Introduction to Motion Builder (For Motion Capture)

okay so this is part one of a video series that covers a very rudimentary workflow for motion capture clean up in Autodesk MotionBuilder and in this video I'm going to cover the user interface of motion builder so when we first open up motion builder this is what we're gonna see some things look very similar and other things are quite different but we kind of break this down it'll make a little bit more sense so on the top left here we have a shelf that is pretty standard across most software packages which is where you have a file menu and edit menu and then you have some other menus here that are specialized to that software so that's where you would go for that right below we have the 3d viewport which is the brain you're doing the bulk of your work and um by default when I first opened up this software the navigation controls were not set to Maya but if you do want to change that you can go to settings interaction mode switch that tamiya here so right below the 3d viewport we have our playback controls so here we have our timeline where we can scrub through our timeline with this bar right here right above that we have our animation takes so this is where you can select different takes if you have them import into your scene then to the right of that we have very standard playback controls where you have play stop and then if you want to skip to the end or the beginning of your animation you can do that as well and then over here we have some more custom features that you can play with if you want to change the framerate and some other things here so right below the playback controls we have a couple of different shelves with some different panels here I'll start over here with a navigator so this panel right here works very similar to the outliner in Maya which is where it stores a lot of things that are in your 3d scene so right here I have a character which I can just unhide and show you that real quick so this is where you would store your characters this is where you would store lights materials and some other things as well constraints sets which I'll cover a little bit later so this is where you store a lot of things that will show up in your actual scene to the right of that we have cheat and to my understanding which is a little limited the dope shade is the dope shoot is a way of controlling your keys the dope sheet allows you to go in and adjust the individual X Y and C information of that animation so you change the timing of that here right next to the dope sheet we have the F curves panel and the F curves panel operates very similarly to the graph editor in Maya which is where we have a graph here with our timeline set at the bottom which we can scrub through and then we have a very similar layout at the top here where you can control your curves and they can also change your tangents here with some other things as well so it's very similar to the graph editor it just does kind of move some things around to the next of f curves we have this story panel the story panel operates a little bit differently than we are used to in animation where we deal with the graph editor and changing keys individually a lot the the story editor works a lot more like video editing which is where you import a track of animation and you can cut and splice different tracks and animation together to create a clip so that's where you do that here and we'll cover that in a later video and then to the right of story we have the animation trigger panel which I'm not going to go too into but for my understanding the animation trigger panel allows you to set up animations and then set up triggers for those animations so that's kind of an overview of the navigator to the right of that we have a couple of different panels here we have key controls there we have animation layers these are things that are very useful when you're animating and will be used a lot when you're animating so on key controls just as it sounds it just helps you control your keys and just you know helps you in that workflow has a lot of tools that are very easily accessible right here so you can scrub between your keys you can key things you can switch between animation triggers and right below that panel we have the animation layers which is very very similar to what we are used to in my and working with animation layers by default motion motion builder will have your base animation layer which is often where you will see your baked animation and right above that it'll set up a blank animation layer for you to work with your frigate like that or use it as you will so next to that we have the resources which are basically a way of organizing and importing information into your scene so over here to start we have the pose controls panel which is where if your character has a library of poses or if you have a library of poses that you want to use you can import those here and adjust those and use them accordingly next to that we have properties which is kind of helps you control your your rigs and specific information so if I select this arm joint here you can go and change the translation rotate rotation information and keep that if you need to just my precedence okay right there so that's the properties panel next to that we have filters which for my limited understanding is a way to help you clean up motion capture keys so it applies different filters to your your animation to help clean up noise and some other things that you don't want if you're trying to polish animation so to the right of filters we have the asset browser which is kind of your where you import a lot of things if I go down here to templates and I open that up we'll see that we have a list of things here which contain a variety of modifiers and basically scripts and sources of information that you would use in a project so if I go in here to characters we have some basic parameters set up that you can drag and drop into your scene we have commands so you can you know do some scripting you have constraints and then you know some other things here physical properties look like a rigidbody if you did want to do some of that so that's where that's stored to the right of the asset browser we have groups which is a another way of organizing your scene so if you have a lot of different objects and things you can organize that and another way to do that is the sets panel right here which is where if you have different sets that you're working with in one project you can setup those with the sets panel and toggle between those as you're you know cleaning up or animating so that's kind of an overview of these shelves down here I'm gonna hop up over to this character panel which is where you're going to be working a lot with your characters if you need to change different things like FK and I K or some different attributes that's where you would do that so you can select your character from here you can select a source which is if you have a character and you want them to inherit the animation from let's say be some motion capture data or a motion capture rig you can select the source here you get some different attributes up here which you can change this will toggle on and off the skeleton I don't have this character set up as a control rig but you can toggle on skeleton and you can change some different things here one of the cool features that they have is that you can basically set up one of these tools I think it's this one it's this one I think where you can set up the I K where you can pull the character along with the AI K and I'll show you that in a later video so that's where you have that we have two controls here which is where you would see those controls and then you also have definition which is where you define your skeleton so if you like we brought this character into our scene you can go in here and select these bones and set them to your character so it can read and create a control rig so that's a very broad and basic overview of the user interface in MotionBuilder okay so this is part two of a video series going over very basic motion capture cleanup workflow in Autodesk MotionBuilder so in this video I'm going to go over how to bring in characters into Autodesk MotionBuilder so I'm going to bring in our motion capture information we're also going to bring in another character and attach that motion capture information to that imported character so we need to do first is bring in a skeleton with baked animation so if I've done is I've gone into Maya and have just prepped a file so I have this this animation here with just some raw motion capture information but I've gone and I've cleaned it up so originally I had two characters in here and a lot of unlabeled markers I'm just gone and deleted those and basically stripped it down to what I need what is just which is just this character right here so one of the things I like to do is to zero out the rotation of all the joints at the first frame and what I found is that this is really helpful when you bring this into motion builder and you need to define your skeleton there's the system that it uses it really needs perfect perfectly zeroed out joints in order to correctly locate each joint and make sure it defines the controller E properly so what I do is I just go into Maya real quick and I select all of these so I just go in here and I go to animation editors graph editor Mitra's I'm gonna do it this way so I'll go select the hips and then select hierarchy and then I'm just going to here let me just this down so we can really hear how basically just delete about three or four of the keyframes and I'm just zero out the first one so way there's just a little bit of blend as it starts out but so that's what I like to do to basically prep this file and once you've done that you would just select either your hips or you would select this locator here and you would go up to file and then export selection export as FBX so when you have that we're gonna go back into motion builder and I'm going to locate the scene so I'm gonna locate the scene and I'm just going to drag it and drop it in here and right now since we have nothing in the Saints a blank scene it's just giving us this one option that says open but we really want to merge files whenever possible so if you have the adoption down here to say merge click that because open basically creates a new scene and merge will merge whatever you're importing with the current scene which is just a better way of working you don't want to get rid of all all of your work by importing something so we're going to press FBX open and all it takes because we do have animation on this so I click that and then right here we have imported the skeleton if I scrub through the timeline we can see our motion capture information so now we need to define a control rig need to define the skeleton of this motion capture information and to do that we're gonna go over here to the asset browser and locate under templates characters I'm gonna drag this we're just going to drop to the scene so it's gonna create a character and now we need to define the joints of this character so they can properly interpret the bones of this so I kind of like to hop back and forth a little bit just a just so I know in my brain which joint I'm working with but generally I'll start top to bottom so in order to do this we have this X right here we need to get this green in order to do that we got to go in here and basically sift through each one of these joints and identify which one of these joints is properly located on this ring so we're gonna start off by just doing with the head so I'm gonna double tap on the head and I'm just going to do a marquee selection I like to do marquee selections because I find that just a single tap selection and MotionBuilder isn't quite as responsive so I just like to do that to be safe so I'm gonna do that and then we're gonna open up the neck here and I'm just gonna click on make sure this is sweet we're going to go up one and you can usually figure out which joint is which if you do need to find that information just by going through your scene and you have the RIC here so you can go in and locate whatever joint you're working with when I find what the clavicle is that you kind of need to move one over just a little bit in order to make it so that MotionBuilder can identify which one is which I've had issues in the past where if you leave it as is it thinks that it's the same joint so you're gonna go in I usually just scoot that over just a little bit so put up this guy do that and if your joints are properly zeroed out you should it should start mirroring everything so if I just double click on this arm you'll start seeing that it just it's going over to the left side as well so we're just going to slip the hand and we don't have any fingers so we're not going to do that and now now I like to start from the hip and work up just because I'm just selecting it be spaced points first all right hit the spine like that open up the spine do these other joints here we'll finally get this one here cool so now we do the links so I'm gonna go down here double tap on the right legs to get these properly defined loose and from what I've heard I've watched a lot of tutorials and I've heard a couple of people say that in order to get the best tobin if you only have one joint here just select the big toe that root join just right there and you should get some pretty decent till Bend even if you don't have toes so now you can see we have defined our character we get this nice big green check mark here which is good it means that everything's in place and our character should be defined so in order to create a character I'm gonna go and I'm gonna walk this and it's going to ask character you want us to do a biped Quadra pet or cancel and we're going to do by then so just like that so we have this character created now what we need to do is bring in another character in order to sync up this motion capture information with that character so I'm gonna go and I'm gonna locate my other character with no animation on it cool so I've located my character with no animation I'm just going to drag and drop this in here and now you see we have this merge option so we're gonna go merge or depress no animation because there is no animation on this so now we have this character in and what we want to do is we actually do have joints on this character as well so if I go in here I'm just going to hide Josh this rig for now so I'm going to properties I'm gonna uncheck visibility so just we can focus on this guy and I'm also going to hide this geometry here as well so uncheck this ability so we can see we have joints here and if I just pull up Josh again this rate you'll notice that the joints there's a different number of joints between both these characters benefit of working in motion though there is that there's a little bit of give when it comes to defining your skeleton so if you correctly defined your skeleton and MotionBuilder is able to figure out the general proportions of your character and there and the bones this is not a problem and so be able to transfer between these two so which is really cool so I'm going to select Josh again and I'm gonna hide or I'm the high Josh and now we're going to define the bones of this character so again we're gonna go into the asset browser and drag character training here and now we're going to define this character it's the same process I'm just going to do this real quick all right so this character is correctly defined and emerge is going to create another biped as well so now we have two characters and in order to see kind of what's going on here if you go into your navigator you you navigate down to characters open this up you'll see we have character and character 1 and so this is basically where we're seeing these characters here so I'm gonna unhide these real quick so I'm going to click on Josh hiding and we know that Josh's character just character because it was the first one that we brought in character one being the the second character we made so I'm just going here I'm gonna right click and I'm going to rename I'm saying Josh I'd also click on character 1 and say I wanna say rig geo so now what we need to do is attach the animation from this rig over to Josh so I'm gonna unhide this geometry here and if I click on I'm going to click on rig geo ok now if I select source and I press Josh you'll see that this character will hop over into the position that Josh was now if I scrub through this on the timeline you'll see that this motion capture information is now transferring over to our rig geo which is super cool so if I just play this we will see that we have our the first step into bringing in motion capture information cleaning it up so we brought it in and in the next video we're going to go over some constraints so this character is going to grab a ping-pong paddle I'm going to make that happen in the next video okay so this is part three of a video series going over really basic motion capture cleanup in Autodesk MotionBuilder so in this video I'm going to get into data cleanup as well as some constraints so at the end of last video basically figured out how to import skeletons and also import characters and we also figured out how to take motion capture information that is baked onto a skeleton and transfer that to a character so if we just kind of scrub through this here oops let me set this to Java so we can reference another rig to inherit animation which is really powerful but in order to really can clean this up and have a little bit more control over the data when we go in and we fix it there's one more step that we want to do so as of right now this rig this character here are our Reiki geo actually doesn't have any animation baked onto it it's just referencing another character and taking that animation and displaying it so what we want to do is we want to basically bake animation onto this rig so that we have a little bit more control so what we're going to do is I'm going to dis double-click here onto this ratio and we're going to go to the character settings we're gonna press input type 2 carrot character makes your active is checked an under input source we're gonna say Josh because josh is the character with is the skeleton the animation on it so that's the animation that we want to inherit for this character so we have that there I'm gonna press plot character and I'm gonna click control rig we're gonna create a controller for this character and I'll wantin FK FK I K so it's gonna pull up this panel here with some options and for the most part these can be left unchecked the are unchanged we don't really need to change anything here except for this right here this constant key reducer we want to leave that unchecked and the reason why is that the constant key reducer from what I understand is a way of reducing your key count where it'll go into your animation and a delete certain keys that MotionBuilder deems is unnecessary and or placed that with interpolate it curves in this case we don't actually want that we want to keep all of that information so that we have more control and we have more to work with when we do our cleanup so we're gonna leave that unchecked and I'm gonna press plot it's going to do a little bit of work and now if I go into this geometry and I just hide it you see we have a control rig here and if I play this back on the timeline you'll see that this control rig now has animation and it is now the driving force of our Reiki geo so now we can go in and we can start doing some data cleanup so I'm gonna just unhide these and we're going to look for just a couple problem areas that we may want to fix so we're going to go in and we're going to do a little bit of cleanup on this character here I've noticed that toes are not posed correctly these toes are not posted this should be they should be flat along with the heel and the floor so we're gonna go in order to fix that so under the F curves tab the panel we're gonna click on our animation layer one and we're gonna make sure that it is not muted and we're gonna go in here and I'm gonna just click on this guy make sure that these are selected otherwise you won't be able to see your keys to make sure that these are selected here and I'm going to just rotate this up so let's should be okay so I'm gonna go in here that is key perfect going to the other side there we go and that looks good so we're gonna press key again oops okay so now if we play this back we have fixed our toes perfect so we have part of that fixed and I noticed as well that the arm here had some intersections right there okay so we're gonna fix this so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just go so we have our problem area right here I'm gonna backtrack to before when it starts intersecting just right there sounds good okay so I'm gonna select this I can handle right here I'm sure that that's slept in select these guys and we're just going to key it straight off the bat so I'm going to locate this in my timeline I'm gonna key now I'm going to scrub through to where yeah probably the most intersecting going on I'm just gonna take this let's scoot this over just so that we can get rid of some of that intersecting looks okay and I'm also kind of key this as 1 so we scrub this back now we have fixed that part of the data so I've gone in and I've cleaned up most of the motion capture data you'll probably notice that the hands are still really stiff and I've been waiting to do that because I do want to add a prop this character is gonna be grabbing a ping-pong paddle right about here so we're gonna go in and we're gonna add some constraints to this character so that he can pick up this prop we're going to do that in MotionBuilder so the first step in setting this up is to import your geometry so in this case this character is going to be grabbing a ping-pong paddle so I'm going to go in and I'm going to grab that so I have the paddle here I'm just going to click drag and we're going to merge no animation okay so that's going to go into the scene this is a pretty small object so I'm going to scale it up we're going to do here is I'm just going to go in and position this to where the character is gonna grab it just that we have a frame of reference and we set up its constraint okay so this paddle is positioned more or less in the right place and we can always fix this later but now we're gonna get some constraints going on this so in order to start activating some constraints we're going to go over here to the asset panel the asset browser panel and under templates if you go down here those are constraints tabs so we'll click on that and we're going to be using this parent-child right so I'm going to grab this and this just dragons it's seen so it's going to give us two options here we're going to attach a child and we're going to attach a parent the child is going to be the paddle and the parent is going to be this wrist control right here so in order to plug these in I found that it's best to just go in here and here's the pic bump and it rename it supposed to go in here and just just drag it from the navigator so I'm gonna go to here drag that under a child and I'm going to select this control open this up drag this under parent okay so we've set that up and if we play this back will notice that the character and the paddle aren't attached to it and the reason why is because we need to click one option here we just set this back do that right here we're in a click snap so as soon as we click that it should snap right into place perfect so it's kind of floating in a sense we do need to fix that pose but the first thing we need to do before that is we need to keyframe this constraint because as of right now you shouldn't be holding this paddle until he reaches out and snatches it so we're gonna go back to this frame right here let's see go over one more frame okay we'll do that and I'm gonna keep the weight right here we're gonna press this K right there okay I'm gonna go back one frame I'm gonna set this to zero already key it again so now when we play this character we'll snatch that ping-pong paddle sweet so we have that setup and now what we're going to do is we're going to pose the hands so we're gonna go back in and we're going to polish up this mocap with just getting that hand post right there so okay so I've just kind of skipped ahead and I just went through and I cleaned up all of the motion capture data repeating the same process and I just you know skip to the process of having to having to you having to make you watch all the way through it so I just went through and added the ping-pong ball and also just cleaned up the animation a little bit added the you know the hit and everything but I essentially followed the same process but let me talk about some things here that I kind of learned during this which were really important I think for if you're working with animation or anything in here um the first is I was using f curves for a while and it's not what up from when I found it's not the primary place to work you can see a lot of the keys that are happening in there but it shouldn't where you it should be where you keyframe things so you can see a lot of this going on you can see your curves in here but you really want to keyframe things in here right this timeline bar right here because let's say I were to copy and paste these keyframes right here okay we have are actually better yet this one right because if we script through here you'll see that that wrist really changes its position so I'm gonna copy these keyframes and I'm scrub through here and if I paste these in here you notice that the wrist doesn't move even though the curves do and the reason why is because we're not working in here okay if I were to undo this okay I'm gonna go through here and I'm gonna click on this keyframe I'm gonna copy that and back right here okay and I made a mistake here what do you want to do is you want to do a marquee okay so when I click that copy or paste and now you see that it makes the proper change so when you're working in the when you work with animation are working with keys want to be keying in here some of the other things I noticed were depending on a knife Retta I've read a little bit up on this when I had this problem but my controls started disappearing and apparently it's a bug that is somewhat recurrent in MotionBuilder but if that ever happens I found that if anything happens in here you can't get it back you can always go in here and select things from here right so if I needed to select this and this control wasn't here I could go in and just tap right here and it'll select it for me so that's one of the things that's really handy same with working with the fingers sometimes like when we were working and I was getting this paddle grab it was a lot easier to just go here and select that pointer finger than to try to you know get around here maybe frame up and then do that I just a lot easier just selecting it here same thing over here there's some of the things that you can do that we're pretty handy is if you shift-click you'll select all of the fingers and then you can just keep them really easily if you need to there so that was another thing and then I also found out here is that you have a couple different modes when you're working with keying up here you have this red here which is body part you have here which is no Pullman manip and you have this right here which was full-body so never this is important when you're working with key because when you have full body-checked and you keep anything it's gonna keep every control on your control rig and sometimes you want that sometimes you don't but it's good to keep in mind if that's checked or not if you're just working with let's say these fingers right you may not want to check whole body because you don't necessarily need all those keyframes getting cluttered up into your whole control ring so this right here is a pretty handy option if you need to have a little bit more control over your I K handles so if I have full body-checked and I grab this I caressed and I pull it over you see that the whole character comes along with it and if we don't want that to happen you can select no pull manip right here if I check that and I try doing it again we'll see that the character does not come past that that point right there that that's stretching point for the character so that can be pretty handy if you're trying to really like get a pose and you can't get the character to move without the rest of his body moving might be good to check a note Pullman it it's not it's pretty handy and overall I've also found that working with these animation layers is really really useful so if you don't know a bunch of work on a one animation layer and then you need to go back and fix something that might interfere with this one you can just go and add another one and work with that I've also found that this is really Andy if you need a key an animation layer you can there's a weight option right here with a K with a key frame options so you can actually key those as well so that was most of the workflow for animation cleanup and constraints as well we're pretty simple just going through and making sure that we go over here to the Navigator making sure that let's see it constraints just making sure that these are set up properly with your child and parent active snapping you know keying the the weight and everything that you need to so yeah overall quite simple pretty similar to Maya and I think that this the working with the controller is actually really really useful because gives you the option of working between FK and I K so if you ever did need to switch you can just make the switch real quick do that animation key it and then go back to I K if you need to so I found that that was a really useful way to work and a good workflow and so that's about it for this video which was going over motion capture cleanup as well as going over constraints so we finished up our motion capture and we've also added the necessary constraints that we need in the next video I'm going to talk a little bit about merging animation how you can take two clips of different animation and combine those into one okay so this is part four of motion capture cleanup workflow for Autodesk MotionBuilder and in this video I'm going to talk a little bit about merging animation clips and how you can take two different clips of animation and combine them into one so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna hop over to the the previous moves folder right here which is just kind of a library of different animations that we can attach to our character so I'm gonna find run straight I'm just going to drive this one in here and then I'm also gonna find run upstairs or get down here too in order to activate the story panel you need to check this right here where it says story just click that make sure it's highlighted and then you will have your your animations show up down here and it'll attach to the ring one thing to keep in mind is that working between the story panel and your f curves panel it's a little tricky so from what I understand until you figure until you get your Clips ready and you bake them you don't really hop back into the F curves panel or you don't mess around with keys or anything and so you get these clips more or less figured out so we want to do is we want to blend these two clips together together and if I play this back you'll see that we have this character running and then we have a character running upstairs there's a couple different problems here the first is that there are different positions so we're going to need to figure that out we also need a blend in between these two animations so we can do that by just starting to go in here and and clip some of these things so what's helped me kind of understand the story editor is treating it a lot like video editing where you see this more as a as a video clip than keyframes so on and so forth so this is like a baked this is baked animation but it's seen as like a clip of video that's kind of helps me understand it a little bit more so let's start blending these two clips together so from what I've found it's good to kind of find similar poses that you can start transitioning in between and in this case I'm gonna start with this character putting your right foot forward so start about right here I'm gonna drag this back and then I'm gonna bring this clip over we're gonna see where that starts and we can see that that character's right foot is coming down so it'll be good to kind of transition between those two two clips if we have the right foot kind of connecting the movement so if you can kind of get an idea of it you can see the right foot coming up and coming down maybe we'll push this over a little bit more tab more so it comes a little bit more in front let's see see about that so that's looking pretty good so we get that right foot kind of blending a little bit even though it's not in the same position quite yet so now what we're gonna do is I'm just going to drag this clip and I'm start pulling it over do you see this kind of cross going on it's a transition between these two so if I scrub through this you'll see that it's now it's transitioning between the two but it's also taking the positions as well we look at that right foot it's pretty good I'd say the transition is pretty alright so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to merge the position of these two clips together so that we can get a more fluid animation so I'm going to go to the right to the middle of these two clips right in the middle of that cross of that X and I'm going to go up here and I'm going to click on match so our match options are going to open up and since we have this clip selected we're going to say it match to the next clip right say a match at current time because we're at the time that we want to match it and then we also want to check XYZ and XYZ for translation and rotation so we're going to hit OK and now if you scrub through this we do get a decent transition between these two clips so if I play this back now you see that it's a much smoother transition and one thing that you can do if you really want to go in and polish this is you can select let's say the route control and you can click on this up here so make sure that this is checked and what that's going to do I just zoom out and I check this you'll see that it starts a trail it basically shows you where this control is in space so if we scrub back through the timeline you'll see that it gives you a nice ghosting there so that you can see exactly what's going on with the curves if you do need to go back and edit them so at this point we finished our transition between these two clips and now we want to essentially go back and we want to bake this into the keyframes so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to select these two clips so this one and this one I'm gonna right click once they plot whole scene to current take ok we're gonna make sure plot on frame and if that's ok 24 frames make sure constant key is unchecked and then we'll say plot so it's going to do that real quick now you see we have a bunch of keyframes that show up on our timeline so if I hop back over into the F curves and let's say I select Translation you'll see that now we have plotted all of that information onto actual keyframes so if we go back into here and let's say unchecked story you'll see that nothing happens the animation doesn't disappear that's because we have plotted it into our actual timeline so if you wanted to you could go in here and you can say you can select some of these and you can start adjusting these accordingly so if you needed to flatten these out or let's say this one right here you want to move these up or down push these in which these out you can do that now so you have a lot of more you have a lot more control once you've figured out roughly where your take is going in plotting it and then adjusting the keyframes so on and so forth and of course the same things apply that we discussed in previous videos where you can add an animation layer then you start animating on top of that and you can key those as well you can we're working with the control rig here so you know there's a lot we can do we can set up more constraints if we wanted to so well she thought there is very layer-based where you can go in and really change a lot in and out if you needed to so that's kind of a really really broad overview of the of the story panel but yeah merging animations is something that would be very useful if you have a lot of I see I see a lot of use for in games I think probably where you have a lot of different animations you need to combine that seems like a very good place to do that so so that was a very broad overview of merging animation clips together in the next video I'm going to talk a little bit about exporting and saving files in MotionBuilder okay so this is part five of motion capture cleanup workflow in Autodesk MotionBuilder and in this video I'm going to talk about saving and exporting files in MotionBuilder so we've worked on this animation for a little bit and now we want to save this file so there's a couple different ways to save files in MotionBuilder you can go up here to save as and it's going to ask you some different things if you want to save it as a FBX binary or an FPS FBX ASCII you can do that you can also save per take so if you have multiple takes in your scene you can go down here and save one per take file because it'll save them out separately so that you can import each take again if you would need to or if you do want to just separate them and have them be different files all together you can do that so the advantage of saving in as FBX and motion builder is that things are very transferable you can move things around very quickly because FBX files are very common in different softwares and in the last video I went over how to combine two clips together and I used this folder right here with just this library of different animations well these animations here are just FBX files much like make Simone which just stores animation FBX so you can bring those in and it has the skeleton which you can quickly define up in here so you can just drag that FBX file in here and then very very quickly attach a character so if you ever wanted to store your own animation you could just export the skeleton here and then re-import it over here so you can store that animation in MotionBuilder if you did want to use it at some other point so the primary way of exporting anything out in MotionBuilder is to export out an FBX and in order to do that what we need to do is we need to bake this control rig onto the skeleton so I'm going to go here I'm just going to select the hip I'm going to go to this blue box I'm gonna do a bake plot not a bake it to skeleton go to wait a second and the control rig is going to disappear and now we have that animation baked on to skeleton of our character so now it's ready to export so we're going to do is I'm going up here to file and we're going to export motion file and you could just title this whatever would like I'll just do just like that save so it's going to give us some options here and since we only have one take we don't really need to worry about this but let's say you have multiple takes in your scene you could go in and you can uncheck the ones you don't want or you could check the ones it's a new one another option you have is to go over here to the left side where it has one take per file so if you wanted to separate out these tanks and individual FBX files you would just check that box and you could separate out the takes um in order to use them separately or individually so in this case this is fine so I'm just going to hit export and it's going to export our animation another way of exporting this file is to export it directly into a Maya scene so what you can do is you can go over here to the top left press file and you have a send to Maya option box so what you can do here is you can send us new scene or you can update a current scene so if you have my open like I do you could just update current scene or you can send us a new scene and an open up Maya for you so in this case I'm just going to press update current scene and its selection is empty send the whole scene we're gonna say okay so we're let it do that and it's going to open up Maya and it's going to import our files so once we have that we can just play back and we see that we have our updated animation important to Maya so that was a very broad overview of motion capture cleanup in Autodesk MotionBuilder thanks for watching

Channel: T J Cousler

Views: 12,473

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Id: 9e7wBdAbFak

Length: 42min 52sec (2572 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020