Yeah I use 3D Studio Max. It's easy to rig and animate a character using their CAT (Character Animation Toolkit) system.
If you are not familiar with 3D animation, here is the gist of it: You begin by essentially adding a skeleton to the limbs of a character, allowing you to animate the rotation and position of each bone. For each bone, you then place "keyframes" (which contain rotation and position data) along a timeline to establish the desired movement over time. I'll post some screenshots and maybe a video of the software and my setup.
To capture the geometry from the game, I use a tool called 3D Ripper DX. It monitors DirectX data that is flowing through the graphics card and records it. You can then import that data into Max and also Maya.
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