But at Phil's suggestion I researched Character Animation Technologies rigging system. If it worked well, we'd save rigging and development time, though at the cost of having limitations of a hard-wired rig imposed on us. In my mind it was a coin-flipper of a decision, except for one thing: CAT had developed an extremely robust animation-layering system. In CS you can layer animation, but not slide the layers around, unless you use the mixer. But if you use the mixer to layer your animation tracks on top of each other and slide them around, the animation in those tracks is not editable. Basically your editable animation file has to live elsewhere. In CAT, each layer is like a completely different scene. You can go into each layer and edit your curves (yes, intuitive, modern curves, thank you very much!), as if each is its own scene, and then scoot each layer and blend each layer to your heart's content. Perfect for our all-in-one-file approach for our character animation. Having all of a character's animation in one big file, by the way, is normally dangerous, as you can accidentally harm finished, polished moves as you work on new ones, but very helpful for clean rig exporting and updating, because you only need to do it once.​