MotionBuilder Basics

when you first open MotionBuilder the first thing to do is to from the settings menu choose the interaction mode because MotionBuilder has a facility to choose the Maya interaction mode that means that the navigational aspects of Maya will be available to you in MotionBuilder so by holding down the Alt key and the left mouse button I can tumble the scene the middle mouse button will track the camera across the scene and the left mouse sorry the right mouse button will dolly in and out of the scene zoom and finally the middle mouse button or so we look along the bottom of the interface on this side we've got a navigator window I think a window shows you what components are in the scene such as the model file the lights any cameras and on this side we're looking through the asset browser window the asset browser allows you to navigate all the assets that are available to you in your project it also allows you to set a safe a favorite path to other assets that you might want to use and bring into your project so by selecting add favorite path and then navigating to that path I can navigate to a clipart folder I have available on this system now I select my clipart folder click on OK and then the clipart folder is available to me in the assets browser window the other thing I'm going to do is click the story tab here now a story timeline really is very similar to the Adobe premier timeline except we won't be dragging and dropping video clips will be dragging and dropping motion capture data onto any character that's in the scene view and has been set up to receive that data so the next thing I'm going to do is to bring a character into the scene I'm going to select the Maya character into the scene choose FBX open no animation don't save the previous scene these little white marks at the end of the character that's the skeleton that's appearing beyond the end of the character mesh and I can switch that off by just choosing models only if I do want to see the entire skeleton and I can select x-ray now this is a skeleton that's attached to this mesh it's been rigged and attached to the next bound to the mesh now I can now choose to add a control rig on the entire skeleton and I do that by selecting Maya in the character controls window and the source is going to be the control rig and I select this - f ki K that's forward kinematics in vertical magics that's the option I'm mingling and now I've got the control rig attached to the skeleton and the skeleton is bound to the mesh if I now select components parts in the rig the respective component parts are selected on the character and if I select the transform gizmo I can grab that in the scene and move the character and it will respond to its I K motion at the moment it's locked so if I choose this icon here I can move the entire counting so like now let's now go back as to choose models only and we're going to navigate to emotions for female and choose walk F that's a basic walk cycle based on a female performer you place it and drag it and drop it in a lower portion of the story window the character assumes the pose on the first frame of the motion data now this clip is what loopable meaning we can drag and tile it out to have several loops of that motion data we need to right click and choose frame start and end and then from the transport window click play we'll just move back so we can see the character or can probably turn the seam to the side press play and every other character is responding to that water cycle motion data but bring that back so so in this tutorial we've seen how to set the navigation to Maya navigation in MotionBuilder some basic on look at the windows available especially the navigator and the asset browser window but also being able to set a favorite path to our own assets that we might want to use in the project selecting the story tab to reveal the story timeline that allows us to drag and drop motion data onto the story timeline now that's quite a nice arrangement for starting our project so what we can do now is in layout choose layout create custom and choose this to be the story now Connor okay so when we next launch MotionBuilder the story layout will be available to us as well as the other three out the box layouts which is editing scripting and previewing so if I choose editing I get that layout preview that layout I get more of a kind of look at the character without all the additional menus and finally we can go back to our story layout real

Channel: westbournemedia

Views: 10,576

Keywords: MotionBuilder, Character Animation

Id: s2KnSXVGJ2Q

Length: 6min 20sec (380 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2018