Alberto, I looked recenty between Messiah, XSI, C4D (basic version) and Animation Master for doing stuff in games.
I eventually went for XSI, as I have heard some bad things about Messiah (still has alot of old bugs and things that should work but don't)
Plus XSI is production proven for games, Lionhead, Valve and some others (I think some EA studios are using it too) all use it. Its very cheap for what you get, and although you only want it for games animation now, you might want todo something else with it later on.
The renderer is beautiful, there has just been a big real time shader tool addon released for free, and using the autorigging inside XSI is a blessing.
It comes with a free rig, that you size up to your characters, and then it generates the bones from that (so it can fit any type of biped you are doing) then you can save animations and reuse them on other characters using the autorig (even if they are different sizes)
there is something similer in messiah, but from what i read it is currently broken.
XSI is an arse to learn, I have come from 3DMax and Maya, and even knowing them found XSI the biggest struggle at first, but after you get over the 3 day hump it starts to make more sence, and is quite well set out for games stuff.
You can also script in it very easily using Visual Basic, JScript and pyphon, so if you need your own tools there pretty easy to make (I made a couple of level building tools).
Also every animtion can be plotted. plotting is basically baking. If your making say bones react to gravity or something and you want to put that into your game, you can bake the bones animation driven by the gravity (or wave deformer, or moving along a curve) into the bones themselves, so you can then export fine to blitz.
oo and inbuilt cloth animation, which is quite basic, but perfect for doing robes, flags, clokes, skirts etc.
Pimping over :)
I eventually went for XSI, as I have heard some bad things about Messiah (still has alot of old bugs and things that should work but don't)
Plus XSI is production proven for games, Lionhead, Valve and some others (I think some EA studios are using it too) all use it. Its very cheap for what you get, and although you only want it for games animation now, you might want todo something else with it later on.
The renderer is beautiful, there has just been a big real time shader tool addon released for free, and using the autorigging inside XSI is a blessing.
It comes with a free rig, that you size up to your characters, and then it generates the bones from that (so it can fit any type of biped you are doing) then you can save animations and reuse them on other characters using the autorig (even if they are different sizes)
there is something similer in messiah, but from what i read it is currently broken.
XSI is an arse to learn, I have come from 3DMax and Maya, and even knowing them found XSI the biggest struggle at first, but after you get over the 3 day hump it starts to make more sence, and is quite well set out for games stuff.
You can also script in it very easily using Visual Basic, JScript and pyphon, so if you need your own tools there pretty easy to make (I made a couple of level building tools).
Also every animtion can be plotted. plotting is basically baking. If your making say bones react to gravity or something and you want to put that into your game, you can bake the bones animation driven by the gravity (or wave deformer, or moving along a curve) into the bones themselves, so you can then export fine to blitz.
oo and inbuilt cloth animation, which is quite basic, but perfect for doing robes, flags, clokes, skirts etc.
Pimping over :)