MotionBuilder/Maya workflow and choice of rig to animate Elmer Fudd?

Rigging
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I’m just learning MotionBuilder 2011 and Maya 2011 and have never animated a character by hand, but have worked with Mocap. Hope to have 2012 within a month (the student version).

I’ll have a lot of motion captured animation that I’ll need to combine with hand animation, so I’m trying to figure out a good Maya/MotionBuilder workflow.

I’m trying to make sense of the choice of a rig, that will hopefully allow movement between MotionBuilder and Maya.

  1. With the changes to Maya 2012, is this even a concern? Has Maya absorbed all of MotionBuilder’s features?

  2. I’d anticipated using a 3rd party rig for more power, but with the HumanIK rig in Maya/MotionBuilder, is this even a concern? Hard for me to judge, having never animated before.

I’ve looked at AdvancedSkeleton, The Setup Machine and RapidRid - and am watching a number of Digital Tutor’s rigging videos - but … maybe I’m not thinking about this correctly and should just use HumanIk? Especially as the developer’s of those products don’t seem to use mocap and have any knowledge of moving back and forth between Maya and MotionBuilder.

  1. Rigs controls for things like the eyes, jaw, complex motions do seem useful. Is there a way to implement these so that they will work in both Maya and MotionBuilder.

I’d appreciate any comments, as I’m a bit clueless at the moment.

My first real project will be animating this character to sing and move in a set with a live character. I’d anticipated creating his facial morphs in Mudbox and maybe rigging the eyes and tongue, but … I’m still working out the details - and am a bit clueless in that area also.

So - any comments at all about the best way to go about this would be appreciated.

Thanks!

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I bacially done a project like this using a 3ds max and motionbuilder workflow so I should be able to help you with this sort of thing. http://www.pixelmaniac.co.uk/hermproject.html

-You want to have your chosen character made or sourced and make sure they are in the ‘T-Pose’.

-Create your skeleton and rig if needed using maya… Then skin your character

-Export your entire scene using the FBX exporter, although you may want to exclude dummies and additional controllers as you only want the character and skinned skeleton

-Import your motion capture data, label your markers, attach rigid bodies and fix any occlusion

  • Align an actor to your motion capture data and then assign the markers to the actor and apply…

-import your FBX and setup your custom skeleton so that it will work with motion capture data

-Set your new character as “actor input” and choose your motion capture actor and it should transform to your custom character

-plot the new animations to the skeleton, delete all motion capture stuff and save…

-in maya you should be able to reimport as an FBX and update your scene elements so you will have animations applied…

This pipeline is quite complex and confusing but if your stuck I will try to help… I might make a video tutorial on the entire process over the next few days and will let you know!

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Scott - a tutorial sounds great! I’m making small videos to document my steps as it’s a lot easier than writing them all down - and to understand a few months from now when it’s not all fresh.

One of my basic questions in figuring all this out though is - which rig?

Is there an advantage nowadays to using AdvancedSkeleton or The Setup Machine or some other 3rd party rig? Or, do you have more power and flexibility (and less hassle) if you use the HumanIK rig that seems to be the standard with 2012 if I’m reading things correctly?

When you say “in maya you should be able to reimport as an FBX and update your scene elements so you will have animations applied…” - I’m unclear on how to do that with a 3rd party rig, and the two developers I asked were unclear.

Maybe that is not an issue at all with 2012, so … maybe I’m worrying about nothing.

But, the choice of the rig to use seems crucial to making things work well?

Thanks!

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when you reimport your skeleton with “plotted” animations from motionbuilder, it will update the skeleton with your animation keyframes.

I used a very basic 3ds max Biped Skeleton because motionbuilder fully supports that skeleton type without extra setting up. You can do custom skeletons to the best of my knowledge but you will need to manually tell motionbuilder what bones corrosponde to what.

ie, head = head bone, left upper arm = left upper arm etc etc.

When I brought a 3ds Max biped into motionbuilder it recognised the bone structure and names etc.

I will be back at my computer tomorrow so I can look at what skeleton types it supports in motionbuilder but any should be good!

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Scott - I"ve been looking at the HumanIK rig in Maya (which will generate a HumanIK skeleton for me), and it would seem like I should be able to use that with my model.

One thing I’ve got to deal with is the model is NOT in t-pose.

I’ve seen a few motionbuilder/maya tutorials where it should be possible to move the joints and get the character in t-pose before characterizing. And I guess in 2012, the process is identical in Maya and MotionBuilder.

So I’m hoping I can skin the model, then get it into t-pose, and then characterize. The new 2012 interface will even tell you when it’s in perfect t-pose (of course, I don’t have it yet).

Then, I only have to figure out how to deal with Facial morphs from Mudbox. I guess I’ll have to make some kind of a rig for the facial morphs, unless I just want to use sliders for each morph.

And … I’m not quite clear about the fingers. I’ve heard that HumanIK is just for re-targeting, but … I’m hoping that it will do coo things like curl the fingers - or that there is some kind of an add-on that will do that?

No doubt the rabbit hole will keep getting deeper as I get down it!!!

Thanks!

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Your correct, once you have your model skinned to the skeleton you can move the skeleton into a T-Pose =)

I’ve made this video tutorial so it may be worthwhile watching… It uses 3ds Max Bipeds but the same theory applies to custom skeletons…

//youtu.be/wxIxle8QASU

It’s quite a lengthy video but should help you.

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Use MotionBuilder when dealing with lots of motion.

For information http://mocappys.com/ has some good stuff and you can check out my blog as well. free stuff , links and other good stuff.
http://motionbuildertraining.blogspot.com/

And if you need to throw it over to Maya you can animate with the HIK and animation layers and add what ever extras you want.

You can setup matching rigs in both Maya and MotionBuilder but it is not as easy as one would hope.

Brad

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[QUOTE=darthwilson;10513]Your correct, once you have your model skinned to the skeleton you can move the skeleton into a T-Pose =)

I’ve made this video tutorial so it may be worthwhile watching… It uses 3ds Max Bipeds but the same theory applies to custom skeletons…

It’s quite a lengthy video but should help you.[/QUOTE]

Scott - Thank you for the video! Very useful.

BTW - I’ve got a friend encouraging me to use 3ds rather than Maya. He uses CAT. Are you able to compare Maya with CAT?

[QUOTE=bclark;10528]Use MotionBuilder when dealing with lots of motion.

For information http://mocappys.com/ has some good stuff and you can check out my blog as well. free stuff , links and other good stuff.
http://motionbuildertraining.blogspot.com/

And if you need to throw it over to Maya you can animate with the HIK and animation layers and add what ever extras you want.

You can setup matching rigs in both Maya and MotionBuilder but it is not as easy as one would hope.

Brad[/QUOTE]

Brad - great links!!!

Actually, I was very much hoping to use nearly the same rig in Maya and MotionBuilder. What makes this ‘not as easy’?

I’ve been trying to use the Skeleton->HumanIK feature of Maya to create a an HIK rig, position it onto my character, skin the character, move the character into t-pose, and then characterize.

But, I seem to be having trouble even with skinning. I’d love to see a video that covered this in detail with a simple character.

BTW - has your 'Character Animator Toolkit for MotionBuilder" been updated for 2012?

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Unfortunately not as I don’t use Maya… I was unsure what CAT was then I had to look it up! seems quite interesting though! Glad the video helped

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Cat is fine but if you want to use the same rig/feature set, and are on maya/mobu 2012 then I would stay there.

What makes the same rig not easy means that if you have lots of custom rigging with expressions and set driven keys it becomes hard to translate the rig with out having a good deal of deeper understanding on the motionbulider side.

Anim toolkit - not updated for 2012, few reasons but main one is that the core of what it covers has not changed. Now there are some bits (some new fcruve editor features, and ui changes but what we covered has not needed updating.)- We have an ebook only version that is priced lower also… yuck sorry that came out all sales pitch like.

I guess I will say (heard here first) that we are thinking about doing a refresh for it but Rigging Dojo is keeping us very, very busy.

@HIK rig- the skinning- look for maya pm heatweight and you will get going quick. Skinning takes practice.

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Brad, have you battered HIK in Maya2012 yet? I’ve been looking to possibly insert it into our remapping pipeline but been hitting bugs all the way. For example, every time I unlock the characterized skeleton the feet rotate incremetally which effects the remap.

Glad Dojo is going well :wink:

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[QUOTE=bclark;10550]Cat is fine but if you want to use the same rig/feature set, and are on maya/mobu 2012 then I would stay there.

What makes the same rig not easy means that if you have lots of custom rigging with expressions and set driven keys it becomes hard to translate the rig with out having a good deal of deeper understanding on the motionbulider side.

Anim toolkit - not updated for 2012, few reasons but main one is that the core of what it covers has not changed. Now there are some bits (some new fcruve editor features, and ui changes but what we covered has not needed updating.)- We have an ebook only version that is priced lower also… yuck sorry that came out all sales pitch like.

I guess I will say (heard here first) that we are thinking about doing a refresh for it but Rigging Dojo is keeping us very, very busy.

@HIK rig- the skinning- look for maya pm heatweight and you will get going quick. Skinning takes practice.[/QUOTE]

Brad - actually, I’m not wed to Maya. My friend keeps telling me that he can rig using CAT and create a walk cycle in just a few minutes - whereas it would take hours to do correctly in Maya. He says the Maya adherents started on Maya, so they are more comfortable there.

I have no way to judge, but rigging more quickly does appeal to me!!!

Are there any downsides to going from 3ds to MotionBuilder and back? I’d be using PointOven to take my mdd data to Lightwave to render.

I guess I’m still very confused about using CAT on 3ds and ?which rig? on MotionBuilder? Would I take the joints into 3ds into MB, and use HumanIK in MB, and then move the motions back over to CAT 3ds if I wanted to do hand animations (I’m going to be mostly mocap).

Or, am I wasting my time, and I should just focus on doing mocap and animation in MB (but, I’m probably missing some needed features then??)

And then there are questions of how to use morphs from Mudbox (whch I know I can do in Maya), I’ll have to check if they come over in 3ds 2012 as easily as they do now into Maya?

I’m just trying to find the ‘deal-breakers’. If I can animate using 3ds, and it’s simpler and faster (he described just drawing a spline and having his walk cycle move along the spline) - then I’m very interested.

I’m posting here as others may have more experience with both platforms, and could point me in a direction where I don’t come across a “You can’t get there from here” scenario.

[QUOTE=darthwilson;10540]Unfortunately not as I don’t use Maya… I was unsure what CAT was then I had to look it up! seems quite interesting though! Glad the video helped[/QUOTE]

Scott - CAT is apparently a previously $1000 add-on (from maybe 2009) that AD decided to incorporate into 3ds. only downside I’ve heard is that there are a few issues that will be addressed in a service pack to 2012 coming out within a month (hopefully). AD has a forum for CAT.

http://the-area.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/3ds-max-cat/

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you can just animate in MotionBuilder the entire way, blend shapes also.

@cat- sure walkcycle- it has some auto walk tools, anyone that says it takes to long to animate something is not an animator, just saying, I don’t know your friend but I do know that walk cycles are not what I judge animation tools on.

If you want the auto walk along path feature then yes, use max and cat,

Create the rig in cat, skin export to MotionBuilder, retarget on to skeleton, send the animation back to cat in max.

Or depending on the capture data you can load it in to CAT , either way you have lots of reading the manuals ahead of you.

@Mark-J- I have not since alpha, I am about to for a review though, just updated to the service pack and I need to see what is fixed.

When you say you are unlocking the characterized skeleton?not sure what you mean.

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[QUOTE=darthwilson;10462]when you reimport your skeleton with “plotted” animations from motionbuilder, it will update the skeleton with your animation keyframes.

I used a very basic 3ds max Biped Skeleton because motionbuilder fully supports that skeleton type without extra setting up. You can do custom skeletons to the best of my knowledge but you will need to manually tell motionbuilder what bones corrosponde to what.

ie, head = head bone, left upper arm = left upper arm etc etc.

When I brought a 3ds Max biped into motionbuilder it recognised the bone structure and names etc.

I will be back at my computer tomorrow so I can look at what skeleton types it supports in motionbuilder but any should be good![/QUOTE]

This thread has been incredibly helpful thanks guys.

I’m having a problem updating my maya rig with mobu skeletal data. I setup the rig in maya with the proper bone names, exported the fbx, did the character setup in mobu, I have motion on the character, plotted everything out, saved selected the skeleton ONLY, setup a character reference in maya with the full rig/animation controls, here’s where it get’s lousy. When I go to Import>FBX>edit preset> I set it to update animation - this is supposed to just take the skeleton in the fbx I’m brining in and updates the skeleton with the final rig (all my namespaces are the same btw) and nothing happens.

I can see data/keys on the joints in the animation graph, and once in a while a foot will move a little, but it seems the IK/rig is locked somehow? Is that making any sense? I could use some help guys - anything is appreciated.