How to use the Motionbuilder STORY to IMPROVE your WORKFLOW

the story tool of motionbuilder is one of the most amazing tool i've come across in 3d software it is powerful it is efficient and can drastically improve and speed up your workflow if you know how to use it well i use it every day for different things and it's just hard for me to work that fast without it and today i wanted to show a bunch of the possibilities it offers and hopefully it will help you understand its potential hey everyone matt here let me tell you a story [Music] right so one of the most common function is the retiming tool so with it you're gonna be able to retime an entire animation or just fragments of it let me show you uh how it will work for one full animation so i have this running animation here let's just say i want to speed it up a little bit so what i would do it would go to the the story just create a character animation track select my character and insert the current take now by default you would have this arrow here which is the loop function and if you click on it you will see that you toggle the scale function and it cycles between loop and scale so the one you the one you want is the uh the scaling one and now what i'm gonna do is just to preserve the original clip i'm just gonna create a new take because with the story when the story is on you override everything that is below in your takes so be aware that if you plot from the story you will completely override and erase the current take so if you want to have some backups always have in mind to create a a new take first and then you can do and play around with uh with some uh some some some modifications uh using the story now if i uh start to stretch the clip to make it smaller or bigger you can see over here that there is a number that is the amount by which you will multiply the original uh play rate of the animation so if i want to speed up my animation i want to make the clip slightly smaller so that let's just say i don't know something like 15 percent and then to keep the clip looping i'm just gonna frame it to the the new uh frame range and you can see here that the animation is speeding up it's very easy because it's very stable i uh i usually use the story instead of stretching keys or time warp and then same thing if i want to make it slower to have a more heavier it doesn't it doesn't fit the the actual posture of the character nor the um the bodybuild but uh this is how i would do it now let me show you how to how i usually use it to retime fragments of one animation i'm gonna switch files so i have this this animation here uh which is pretty long and let's just say for the purpose of that video i'm just gonna make that jump over a very slow-mo so same thing i'm just gonna add a character track actually as you can see here i have a camera animated so i'm just gonna go and select the current camera i'm gonna alt drag or x drag if you're using maya shortcuts which is automatically gonna create a uh camera track for me and i'm gonna insert the character take first in the character animation which takes some time because the animation is quite long same thing for the camera i have added the camera that way i can i'm going to retime the camera as well which i want otherwise my camera will just follow the original speed and then we will lose our character now i'm going to just find a moment where i want to start the slo-mo which would be something around here and now you have the razor tool over here so if you click having both of your clips selected you will cut them at that current frame and then i want to find this would be actually i want to make it a bit a bit earlier than this let's say around here and then i'm gonna look at the moment where i wanna move back to full speed okay now to make some space because these two clips are gonna be longer because i want the animation to be slower i'm just gonna move them over time here i'm gonna zoom on these and i'm gonna make them sorry longer by selecting the scaling function over here and i'm going to make them so if you want something very slow-mo you want to go for something like 10 of their speed or 20 let's just try yeah i'm gonna need to move them a bit more let's try all right 12. now let's try slo-mo and then we go back to the actual speed now this is just an example i usually use it a lot for interactions uh when i have mocap i like to highlight the actual impact by speeding that moment of the animation by 10 15 20 percent uh there's no golden rule for the for the amount that's just your uh your eye that is gonna uh have to work over here uh same thing for attacks for example i usually um add a small delay so i would slow a little bit slow down the animation right during the anticipation before the actual swing and i would speed up the swing to highlight the um the strength the second most common function would be the repositioning mechanic so i'm gonna go back to the to the first file which would be this one and i've actually prepared the take which is called bud placement uh i have a loop which is a basically in the middle of nowhere uh and even following a very weird angle so what i'm gonna want to do is just to reposition it to face the forward axis and to make it so that the first frame is on zero zero zero so i'm gonna add this animation once again to the story turn it on and then you're gonna have to if uh if you select the clip and start to move it around you you won't have any any gizmos you want to uh you have to turn on the the ghost here and then suddenly you will see uh the manipulator over here so you are able to either move that manually which is the entire clip not the the frame right and rotate it as well you can do it manually or you can input some uh some values over here so to make sure i'm following the forward axis i'm just gonna go to the front camera over here so the first thing i want to do is just to place it on the uh on the center of the scene uh so if i select the clip i just had to input zero zero everywhere and then you will see that uh we're back at the center and then i will just rotate it so that it's facing the the forward axis now same thing uh it's it's really first a good option to you for you to organize your your files and then it would be something very easy if you want to uh adapt an animation to environment or some geometry uh just to give you an example let's just say i uh this module over here is just moved and i want my jump over to still match the new geometry i could easily uh im so add the animation in the in the story move it around so that the actual hand is placed on the newly placed geometry one cool feature that is maybe a bit hidden is the reverse function that's basically the ability to just play your animation backwards so let me show you you just need to uh insert the current take turn the story on and then select the clip and under its properties over here you would have a category called time warp uh and you just need to click reverse and if you play then animation will be play played backwards now you might be wondering uh is it really useful i don't use it quite often i've sometimes used it for prototype animation or to get some solid foundations if i had worked on let's just say a strafing animation going right i would just duplicate it play backwards to have the the left motion and then i will start from here to just get a newly fresh animations of course but uh i would use it as a as a work base one of the primary functions of the story is in its name it's to build stories so it's the ability to stitch clips together so you can add content from outside you can add directly from takes full takes or fragments of takes and add them onto a timeline to build larger content exactly what you do in what you would do in a video editing software so for the example i will use the that running loop and i have another animation a combo swing and i want to make sure that this combo triggers from the the run animation so i'm gonna make sure it triggers from from motion so i'm gonna go ahead and start by creating a character track with my character with the first the run animation okay then actually what i will do is just i'm gonna uh duplicate it so you have as one of the other function you have uh different methods you could technically duplicate the uh the the clip here and make sure by selecting for example the hips or the left foot to create a match here so that they trigger one after the other and you have another option which would be to set the clip to read only i'm just going to save it on desktop it's just going to process a little bit and then from here if you're set to loop then if you drag the clip you can see here that it starts looping over over and over again so i'm gonna just create three of them so that i have uh let's create a new a new take actually just like i said earlier it's good to have just a blank take to prevent from erasing something you didn't want to to erase all right so i have a lot of data here to be working on and then i'm gonna bring the uh the combo so you could technically just add the the the combo swing take on the same track but uh to show you also some cool feature of the story i'm gonna i'm gonna add i'm gonna be using a second track so let me just create another one with the same character and i'm gonna add the the combo swing okay so just like in a video editing software this is working as a timeline which means that the the lowest track or one track actually overrides the content from all the tracks set above so you would expect to see the the running animation over here but you can see that you you're not seeing this and instead you're seeing a pose which is the first frame of the combo swing clip which is set here now hopefully you can there's a workaround you can bypass it by clicking on this icon over here and click on pass through so that track it means that if there's no clip that track will just let the information from above uh flow through kind of and it's the exact same thing with a take you can have the story enabled and you can also read directly from a take so if i was to mute that take you can see here that if i play animation there is nothing here but i'm actually playing something which is in the the combo swing take and then when the clip takes over we actually play the clip i can do the same thing if i choose the run modified i'm gonna have my run my run animation for 21 frames because this is how long my take is you can see here with the with the wrench and then later i'm gonna still have the the combo swing clip so remember this because it's really powerful and i will show you an example of how you can use it in the next function let's get back to what we wanted to do which is happening on our new take and now what i want to do is just i'm going to have to make sure that this animation triggers well from from this so i'm gonna pick uh a frame here which would be a left step and then i'm gonna do the same thing here so the moment where the character just set the left foot flat on the ground and i'm gonna match these two frames on the timeline okay now by default of course since i have all that clip here uh i i don't have the the right animation anymore the cool part is that story tracks are using a weight function and it works exactly like layers so you can even key these i mean you can key the the weight which means that you are able to completely mute a track for a moment and then smoothly just uh animate it by setting the weight to 100 or or less and then since you can animate it you can do whatever you want okay so in our example here we want to start by having a weight of zero and then somewhere near the the moment we have that left step we want the weight to be set to a hundred okay so that we smoothly blend from one track to the other and now of course what we want to do uh making sure we have both ghost enabled is that we're gonna have to make our clips match and then my uh left foot is the reference point here that's the uh the downside of working with multiple tracks is that you're gonna have to manually set the position of the different tracks but i actually like it better because it it gives you much more control so how does it look not too bad but i guess we could tweak the moment where we uh i think the uh this is just a little bit too too harsh the the plan is actually too fast and i think our clip can be just set backward a little bit so what you can do as well is when you have a character track selected go to the f curves oh yeah there's a bug so when you select the a track and go to the f curves the actual track gets if if it's on the same window and you have tabs it gets deselected so i'm gonna have to do to create a new window with the the curves and you can see here oh no i didn't want to do that all right uh yeah okay my face is just somewhere else is good and then when i click on the track you can see here that the weight has a as a curve so it's it's it's far easier for you to tweak from i don't pay attention to that right now under the ground that's for another purpose and then you have much more control because then you you can you know set the keys to flat to linear to whatever you want yeah okay but i think you get the point right uh what you can do as well is just we could slightly set those clips a little bit sooner so that the the blend happens a little bit sooner too and that's it see you have a a proper you have a blend that already looks okay promising of course you have some deceleration that is not very natural but as i said it's usually something you would do to get a very solid work base and then you would work your way from here by fixing the footing removing all the slide uh making sure the animation has a proper waiting and so on and so on now this is when the rhino comes in handy so i've downloaded this heat reaction from mix ammo and what i'm gonna do is just i'm gonna build a another story and i'm gonna make sure that the rhino reacts to the combo swing that i've just that we've just created from motion so what i'm gonna do is just i'm gonna go back to the the take i was working on previously and i wanna make sure that i because i haven't done this i'm gonna have to plot the actual data on a new take [Music] now what i'm gonna do is just i'm gonna import back the entire take i've just created okay and leaving the story on i'm gonna switch to the mixamo.com animation so take which is the rhino reacting and what i want to do here is just gonna i'm gonna have to make them to time them so that the rhino reacts to the uh to the swing so the problem we have here is that the rhino uh reacts pretty soon so what i can do is i'm free to do so is just i'm gonna drag the uh the clip before zero before the uh to to set it earlier in time and i want to make sure that that first strike i'm gonna s and i'm gonna mark it here kind of matches with the rhino first reaction here which is somewhere in here so i've i've pushed it back way too early okay and then i'm just gonna have to i can reposition the tool using what we've seen previously in the video to make sure that my character actually strikes that poor rhino okay just to re-frame this okay now the cool part is that the rhino is completely exterior to the to the story and the story only contains that uh samurai hitting running and hitting and then you can you can build uh something and build a new story from this and then if you're happy with the result uh you can just create a new take which would be uh or let's just make it on this one for example if you select your character and then plot it then if you turn off the story then in one take you have both of your characters reacting so then you would need to add a proper idle to the rhino with some kind of anticipation to the strike incoming but you start seeing the point of the the potential right and then the last thing i want to show you is the ability to export clips from the story and import them on another fbx on the character that would be compatible so i'm gonna once again just create sorry this is not yeah i'm gonna create a new character track select my character and then insert the current animation which is the run to combo that we've been creating and then i'm gonna right click on the the clip making sure the story is turned on and i will hit export clip and i'm gonna erase one that i've already created which is the combo from ron so you can give a name in my case i want to raise it and then let it save okay it's done and then on a new file i will insert a animation track with my character and then industry insert animation file and then select the clip you want set it to zero and then you have the animation directly coming from the previous file which is very stable and very practical if you want to you know import animations you've been creating if you have i don't know loops that you want to use in multiple files that's a very convenient way to just use them in in between all your files and to have this kind of a kind of a library of animations you've been uh gathering and creating over time i just think this tool is pretty amazing we've seen that you can re-time your animations or fragments of it you can reposition your clips very in a very stable way you can stitch clips together and create new assets based on existing ones you can create stories with one character with multiple characters you can work at the same time with the story on and off having a character that is outside the story but you can build some assets with a character that is inside the story it's really amazing i'm a big fan of it and i'm sure that in a couple of days you will be too if you want more tutorials on motionbuilder i encourage you to click right here thanks very much for watching have fun stay safe and see you soon bye

Channel: Matt Courtois

Views: 1,014

Keywords: autodesk motionbuilder, motion builder, motionbuilder, tutorial, game animation, gameplay animation, autodesk, motion editing, matt courtois, how to use the story in motionbuilder, motionbuilder story tool, motionbuilder story, motionbuilder workflow, motionbuilder tutorial, motionbuilder story tutorial, mo bu

Id: zvRT_oFGIZs

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021