So, if you guys had the opportunity to make a whole new Game Animation Pipeline, what animation suite would you choose? Maya or MotionBuilder? What are the pro’s and con’s?
I assume that the project would contain Mocap data.
That would make the use of motionbuilder proficient with cleaning up the initial data and also the ability to apply those awesome filters that aren’t available in Maya yet.
Other than that I would with a stable rig personally prefer animating in maya after the initial clean-up and filters.
I think you should consult with the animators and see how they would like to work and try your best to base the solution after their desires,
it’s rather important that they feel comfortable with the decision aswell.
The result would probably be that they’d be interested in using both.
Then the best solution might be to make a rig that enables both managing Mocap(from motionbuilder) and keyframe in Maya.
Although I just made a rig like this for a school project it worked out really well and it isn’t all that hard to make, it also allows for very easy retargeting.
If you’re not using Mocap I’d go for a Maya pipeline.
I’m very interested in what people think of this as well for an upcoming project so please feed the thread.
Like Emil said it really depends on what you want out of the pipeline, and how your animators are used to working.
If your artists are comfortable with maya and will be mostly keyframing i would stick with that since it would require the smallest amount of down time due to any type of learning curve that may be necessary for new software.
Generally i would say that if you arent doing mocap stick with maya i personally prefer the freedom of the rigging\key system.
In the newest versions of the autodesk software (2012) maya incorporated some of the motionbuilder animation editing and has a one button swap between the packages now so potentially you could still use both packages if you really wanted to.
Another thing to look at is how you need to export from your animation packages, keep in mind that Motionbuilder is in CM while maya can swap around which can have all sorts of issues if you are mixing source files from maya and animation from motionbuilder all combined in to a game engine.
In closing, look at where the art is coming from and where is needs to go, do several tests BEFORE you implement anything testing each possible line. IE:
Baserig from maya, animations from mobo -> to the game engine
baserig from maya, animations from maya -> to the game engine
and figure out the EASIEST route, this will save you lots of time during production troubleshooting unforseen issues.
Having worked with both Maya and MoBu with and without Mocap data, I thing both are great choices for a game pipeline. Especially with some of the new Human IK features in MoBu/Maya 2012. So much easier to now drive a characterized rig with mocap data.
The biggest advantage for me working primarily with Mocap data is that MoBu has a strong tool set for working with animation data, in my opinion, easier than Maya. I enjoy working with the FCurve filters that motion builder has than working with the Graph editor in Maya. Mobu’s Story tool is a great asset as well for editing animation that might be on a cycle or stringing motions together.
In all, both are great options for a game pipeline, and I see no reason why you wouldn’t want to jump back and forth between both. As raven5326 said…find the easiest route that will get you there and with the best results.
It depends on the projects and the amount of data and how much time you want to spend. Motionbuilder is fast but less flexable and bugs are harder to work around, Maya is slower, more flexable and sometimes the bugs are hard to work around but most can be hacked away at.
For large amounts of animation assets that need to be mixed, retargeted, edited, etc though Maya and Max can’t touch MotionBuilder though they are trying to speed up.
The animators will make or break the choice though so work with them on all the details.