Referencing in Motionbuilder 2014

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone,

I'm referring to the recent video brought out by Autodesk regarding motionbuilders referencing features in 2014. As I thought, the video does not describe the limitations, and there are indeed a lot.

Motionbuilder seems to collapse all the joints into 1 big ball of mess once you add a control rig to your characterized skeleton, after referencing the character in, saving the scene, and opening it back up.

Ideally, this feature would be great, and it would replicate maya and Max's ability to do referencing. The goal is to be able to reference a skeleton and geometry fbx file, construct the characterization and control rig in motionbuilder, and have the characters skin, and new additional geometry propagate through to the application once a change is made.

Unfortunately it doesn't do that, and I hope the developers are aiming to get that functionality working.

Here is the features video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOm7PH_eiGg

[joel.pennington]

Hi gabester83,

Here's a thorough guide of referencing in MotionBuilder which includes the limitations. 

http://docs.autodesk.com/MB/2014/ENU/MotionBuilder-SDK-Documentation/files/GUID-76FBC919-01B2-4DF5-9...

This first implementation of referencing is meant for layout and scene construction. You can reference a character rig, however, any animation on that rig outside of the storytool will not be saved.

JP

[Anonymous]

Hi Joel,

Web Page cannot be found.

Thanks

[joel.pennington · Accepted solution]

Try this? 

http://docs.autodesk.com/MB/2014/ENU/MotionBuilder-SDK-Documentation/index.html?url=files/GUID-76FBC...

Or search the 2014 docs yourself 🙂 

[madcarrot2007]

There are bunch of things including Character Rig/Character extensions cannot be loaded from a referenced object.

But, I was hoping be able to reference the geometry and skeleton, and then make a rig out of it which will become a standard character rig that to be used across the production team, in this case when the geometry changed, it would change in all the animation scene files. Like gabester83 said, and I also tried it in MB 2015, the rig just collapses into a ball when I reopened the file, this makes the current referencing system pretty much useless.

[BradClarkRiggingDojo]

You can still use a standard rig and use Story as your Motion reference system. As far as Geo updates you can merge in /replace the current models.
Not ideal but manageable, better if you script the settings for the rig so you can quickly rebuild the control rig and character settings that you want everyone to have.

[Anonymous]

Interesting, though correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought story was only useful for overall motion blending between tracks. It doesn't cater for adding layered animation onto the rig unless you bake that into the motion clip.

The problem is, that while one authors the motion, they may be working away on it, and don't necessarily want to convert their data into a clip everytime they want a rig update.

What should happen is as it happens In maya. If new nodes are created to the source rig, and as long as that rig is referenced in another file, opening the other file will update the reference and the animation keys (however placed) continue to work in a non-destructive fashion.

[BradClarkRiggingDojo]

Right, don't get me wrong, I understand and it isn't the same as a real referencing but it is what exists. I have wanted and requested this as have others for the last 10 years.
The rig can be updated, and just pointed to in story again and the animation will apply.
Story instead of layers, uses subtracks that work just like animation layers.

more often though you can merge in the changes to update what is in the file and the animation will work as expected (depending on the change)

If you need more detail or your studio is in need of deeper consulting you can get message me.

[jps]

On solution I've been using for years, is to construct your pipeline around character animation to dissociate rigs and animations.

On your source control you will store your rigs files and all animations will be character animations files.

That way you can update the rig and still load any character animation on it.

The rig has to get any extra animated element as extension (like weapons, extra limbs, game nodes...) if you need them to be saved and load as character animation.

Animator will open the rig file and load any character animation they need. After editing the animation, they will save each take as a separated character animation.

Using scripts can help a lot to automatize this loading saving process.

Adding simple scripted tools to swap skin objects that share the same skeleton will help a lot animators too.