The Control Rig is one of the 3 ways you can animate a character in MotionBuilder. It is MotionBuilder’s Full Body FK/IK character rig and although it is designed for editing mocap, it can also be used for animating characters – it just requires a little translation into more animator friendly terminology. Because the Control Rig was originally designed to…
Using Custom Bone Names in MotionBuilder
Creating a Custom Character or Skeleton Definition File allows you to use your own custom bone names and still automatically characterize characters. Once a character has been manually characterized, a “Custom Character Asset” or “Skeleton Definition File” can be created. These assets provide the same automatic characterization functionality as the default MotionBuilder Character asset but…
How to Characterize a 3DS Max Biped in MotionBuilder
In this tutorial you will learn how to successfully characterize a 3DS Max Biped character in MotionBuilder. Before you can begin using the character animation features in MotionBuilder you will need to characterize your Biped. The process involves 3 main steps: T-Posing – This is the most import part of the process and requires accurate…
A 10 Step Guide to Building a Skeleton for MotionBuilder
This simple 10 step tutorial will show you how to build a skeleton and prepare it for use in MotionBuilder. Building a skeleton for MotionBuilder or motion capture is the same as building a skeleton for any other purpose, apart from you don’t need to rig the skeleton to animate it as MotionBuiler uses it’s…
Using MotionBuilder Story Tool
This tutorial will explain how to use the MotionBuilder Story Tool to create an animated cut-scenes or pre-vis sequences. I will guide you through every step of the process from importing your characters and environment into MotionBuilder and animating them using the Story Tool to plotting and saving the finished animation. The Story Tool allows you to…
How to Realign Motion Capture
Motion capture may require realigning from it’s original capture position for a number of reasons; for instance the data may require aligning with the environment or to make it more compatible with a game engine or crowd simulation. There are a couple of different ways to realign a character in MotionBuilder: One uses the often…
How to Merge Characters in MotionBuilder
The issue people often have is, once they merge a second animated character into a scene, the original character stops moving. In this post I will explain how to merge two animated characters into the same take in MotionBuilder and hopefully prevent this from happening. Open the first file Open the first character file. File>>Open the first…
How to Create a Live Shadow in MotionBuilder
Adding a Live Shadow to a scene is a simple process which can help ground a character without the need for an environment. The live shadow can be added to an existing scene to make renders a little more interesting or to a scene ready for editing or using during a live motion capture session to…
Creating an In-Place Looping Animation in MotionBuilder
This tutorial is a follow on from Creating a Looping Animation in MotionBuilder, showing you how to edit a traversing animation like a walk or run so that it loops on the spot There are two ways to do this in MotionBuilder: Using In Place Mode on the Control Rig Deleting Key Frames in the FCurve…
MotionBuilder Pipeline
In this motionbuilder tutorial I will take you through the processes involved in preparing and exporting your character into motionbuilder and then importing your lovingly crafted animation back on to your character. Because of the many different possible combination of plug-ins and software versions I will try to make this tutorial as generic as I…