Motion Builder Tutorial

[Domarius]

http://www.pixelwerks.be/pictures/MB_tut_01.avi

oDDity's motion builder tutorial for all us animators.

Requires this codec:

http://www.divx.com/divx/play/

 

One thing - layers are actually for seperating animation timelines for the entire body, not seperating body parts.

 

Body parts already have their own channels within a layer - just select the body part and the keyframes shown in the timeline will only be the keyframes for that body part (provided you are in "body part mode", as shown in the vid).

 

Layers can be used to easily layer movements over one another and keep them seperate and editable. This has two major uses;

 

Layering movements

Just say you animated a walk cycle. The hips will have maybe keyframes that twist it left to right.

 

You decide you want to add some up & down bobbing movment. Using layers, you can seperate your "bobbing" keyframes from your "twisting" keyframes, so that you can edit one without modifying the other.

 

Make a new layer, and select the hips. You will notice the are no keyframes visible. That's because they are in the other layer.

Now if you define keyframes here in this layer that make him bob up and down, you will only see those keyframes - BUT - and this is the most powerful feature of MotionBuilder - the effects of both the twisting AND bobbing keyframes will be blended together as if they were on the same timeline.

 

Because they ARE on the same timeline - but when you seperate them using layers, they are hidden from each other, so you can edit them independantly, and if you happen to have a "bobbing" keyframe on the exact same frame as a "twisting" keyframe, the two will NOT be permanently welded together (as they would be if you had them on the same layer), so you can freely change one layer's animations without screwing up another layer's animations.

 

 

Pose tweaking

Say you have a walking animation. You decide that he's not leaning forward enough for the entire animation. In Maya, with only a single timeline, you'd have to go through every keyframe for his back and rotate it forward.

 

But in motion builder, you just make an empty layer, and set one keyframe a the start for the back, rotate it in the positoin you want it, et voila, the entire walk animation has him walking the way you want him to. I have a layer specifically for this, that I call "pose tweaks".

[BlackThief]

ok I'm able to import the fbx into maya now, however 2 skeletons are imported - I guess I can delete the one, that doesn't match the mesh, but I'm not sure about this and why 2 skeletons are imported.

oddity any idea what's going wrong?

[Domarius]

There is probably an old motion capture skeleton in there - just delete him. Obviously I forgot about it, since I'm not even basing them off motion capture anymore.

 

*edit* Whoops, just checked out the pic - that's nothing like what I expected to see. Don't know why its so closely matching the real skeleton, but slightly offset. Maybe its the old motion capture skeleton trying to do the animation I put onto the real skeleton?

 

AH well, if you delete it and the whole anim makes it into the game fine, who cares

[Doug]

You can do all this with the graph editor in maya.

 

I do have a question with the idle anim given to us. Does anyone else have a weird finger jump/move when they view it in Maya?

[Domarius]

Wrong thread for it. Can a mod clean up these last two posts?

(Delete, move, whatever... )

[Domarius]

This tutorial has been officially Wiki-fied, and can be un-stickied.

http://www.thirdfilms.com/darkwiki/index.p...uilder_tutorial

[ascottk]

oDDity must've moved his video tutorial so I put the copy I had on ftp:

http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/Tutorials/MB_tut_01.avi

 

& I updated the wiki to reflect that:

http://www.thirdfilms.com/darkwiki/index.p...uilder_tutorial

[Domarius]

Nice work