MoBu – How to set Character Solver via Python

Tools MotionBuilder
1

Hi,

I’m having trouble setting the solver type in Motionbuilder 2014 via Python. There don’t seem to be any examples of how to do this in the documentation though I was able to figure part of the problem.

By default, MoBU 2014 sets a character to use the HIK 2014 solver. I can confirm this using below commands:

myCharacter =FBApplication().CurrentCharacter
print( myCharacter.GetExternalSolver().Name )

>>HIK 2014 Solver

I was also able to print out the 3 solver types like this:

print( FBCharacterSolver.GetRegisteredSolverNames () )

>>> [‘HIK 2013 Solver’, ‘HIK 2014 Solver’, ‘MB Character Solver’]

My problem is how to set my current characters solver to ‘MB Character Solver’. I was able to find the SetExternalSolver method but unsure what to do with it. What would be the correct syntax to do this:

myCharacter.SetExternalSolver( ‘MB Character Solver’ )

Much Thanks!

2

It’s index based.

myCharacter.SetExternalSolverWithIndex(2)  # MB Character Solver

You could make a function that would take a string like this:

def SetExternalSolverWithString(character, name):
    solvers = pyfbsdk.FBCharacterSolver.GetRegisteredSolverNames()
    try:
        index = solvers.index(name)
    except ValueError:
        raise ValueError("Solver name %s not valid.  Valid names are: %s" % (name, solvers))
    character.SetExternalSolverWithIndex(index)
3

Ahh, thanks. Totally worked. I may have been thrown off because I expected the solver name to change in the left hand part of the Navigator under the character name. I see that it did update in the drop down under the Character Settings tab.

Cheers!