We’re looking to move into Maya for Character Modeling and Animation, but unsure what versions to go into bed with!
We currently use Max 2010 sp1 and MotionBuilder 2011 adv. pack sp1. – out of which MotionBuilder get’s to stay, but only to do what’s it’s really good at, like sit in our mo-cap pipeline or string body motion together in story.
In Maya we’re keen on using HIK’s characterization, control rig and retargeting + the ability to retarget to a custom control rig (could be done with custom binding method, but out of the box == more time for fun stuff for me). Also being able to share any HIK setup done in Maya with MotionBuilder and vice versa would be great.
But if stuff is too broken, we would rather have a few less featuers MotionBuilder 2011 almost made me quit my job you know… (True story)
So, any pointers on which version of Maya and MotionBuilder to use?
Sune
Please feel free to send any software slander in a PM.
I’m sure Brad Clark can give you a concrete answer but AFAIK the Mobu/Maya integration has gotten better every release. And there may be enough character animations features in Maya 2013 that you may not need Mobu (they seem to be taking it strongly in the previz route).
Actually I just posted a few notes here http://motionbuildertraining.blogspot.com/ both on some FBX bugs and the latest HIK update, I am waiting on service pack releases for both Mobu 2013 and FBX.
Yeah overall it looks like the HIK improvements in Maya 2013, may make it attractive enough to be an Early Adopter. As far as inter-op, actually that’s more of a "nice to have”. I could easily live with the classic workflow of bouncing animation back and forth with baked keys on a skeleton.
If the initial release of Maya 2013 is stable enough I think we’re going to bite the bullet. Maya SP1 is just out and we’ll still be in pipeline pre-pro by the time adv. pack should hit the shelves (historically around August me thinks).
As we have a working MotionBuilder 2011 pipeline for mo-cap cleanup and body animation, it might be worth staying with 2011 here. I’m not aware of what program and API changes there are from 2011->2013, but if I have to choose, I’d rather spend my time building an awesome Maya pipeline, than fixing tools and rigs in MotionBuilder.
One concern with Maya is if Trax can replace MotionBuidler Story Mode… In the olden days, Trax was really not so hot
FBX 2013.2 just released, I updated the blog with some info.
If you know your enemy in Mobu 2011 then stick with it, Trax got some of the functionality from Story and the HIK fixes in 2013 are a huge improvement though even with the current service pack there are problems with Maya, currently rotate orders are broken…nothing big just all transforms can only have the default rotate order…@##@$#@$. ATOM file format doesn’t load on to HIK rigs correctly, but you can just use FBX to save and load the data but it would be nice to have full support for layers and constraints… you can use the Red9 tools since they do work with HIK and provide most of what you would need including a pose library tool that is missing in Maya.
I really, really wish TRAX didn’t require the use of character sets but there were bugs in the past that seem to have been fixed in my last tests though I am not sure how well it will play with all the HIK tools, maybe Mark can talk about HIK and TRAX interplay?
I would add that once mobu 2013 gets a service pack you should test it out in trial mode just to see if the improvements are worth it. They did unify the character gui between the two etc… but if you are trying to stay more in Maya than Mobu… it still might not be worth the trouble, with out knowing your pipeline and animators better it is hard to say.
Currently if you have .AMC .ASF files in your pipeline you can’t use 2013 because they broke the import , for small places like WETA this would be a problem.
Maya 2013 got a big update to the Trax editor which I keep meaning to do a few Vimeo demos for, just not got round to it yet. Before this release blending clip data in Maya was an artform that required custom setups and tools to manage correctly, but for 2013 we’ve been working with AD to fix this issue and what you now have is very similar to the Storyboard mode in MB. You get ghost data to show the clip travel direction, and you get the ability to automatically align 2 clips motion, the blending ACTUALLY WORKS! We’ve only tested it on our setups, and to be honest it was developed around them, but it works fine on rig and FK skeleton data. Maybe before I leave Eurocom I’ll do a few demos as the one that AD put out wasn’t too clear.
MotionBuilder 2011 almost made me quit my job you know… (True story)
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