hi, i am working in maya, and tried motion builder… i really like the interface.
for those who worked with it before, i was wondering how the transition works,
is it comfortable importing and exporting to maya? can you bring in a complete rig from maya into motion builder? basicly, is it comfortable to do a short film with maya and just the animation with motionbuilder??
thanks
hey I have the same Question, I am testing motion builder LE right now.
and was wondering about maya to MB back to maya pipe-line.
and does the fbik transfer to maya?
thanks
yury
Yes, it’s comfortable going between the two, but it takes some finesse. IKs and controls rigs set up in Maya don’t transfer between the two programs, basically you just want to put in a skeleton and skin your character and then do all the setup in MB. Really, that’s what MB is made for, easy character setup. But it’s fairly easy to animate in MB and transfer the animation back to Maya.
ynedelin, I think you’re asking if the FK/IK transfers back to Maya. No, not directly. If you’re going to animate in MB, you want to do all your animation in MB, the control rig doesn’t transfer back to Maya. However, once it’s animated, you plot all the animation to the skeleton itself and that will transfer to Maya.
If you guys have more specific questions on the pipeline, I’ll try to help. I’m not an expert with the process by any means, but I’ve been in charge of it here for a few months.
Edit: ynedelin, I just realized you meant the Full Body Rig in Maya 7.0 I haven’t used it, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, there are lots of bugs between Maya 7.0/MB 7.0 but they should be fixed when Maya 7.5 comes out. To me it doesn’t really seem worth it because I do lots of rig customization in MB that won’t transfer between the two programs, so we have to bake the animation to the skeleton.
Thank you very much chellescreations,
this is the thing I am trying to find out. Let me recap.
I mean, is it important to have the same amount of joints, the same arangement of joints, the same dependencies or is this done via the characterisation?
Does MB find out if there is a upper-arm rotation joint or lower leg rotation joint and does MB do its magic joint setup in accordance to the Maya setup?
Will the MB Skeleton differ from the Maya-made after characterization?
Would you do the facial animation in MB or in Maya? I tend to do it in Maya. Do you have any experience concerning facial animation?
Does the import/export Maya7.0/MB7.5 work?
Does the version of the Plu-In matters? If YES, do you have a working version combination?
I also need to setup a workflow between Maya 7.0.1/MB 7.5/Cinema4D 9. When I export a simple camera move between softwares like C4D and Maya via FBX Plug-In i get weired jumps and a rotated camera as well. Where is the trick of the exchange thing? At least it is not that easy as import as/ export as.
For an answer I would be super happy.
thanks in advance?
I’ll try to answer as best I can, but some of these questions I can’t help you on. Sorry!
For characterization in MB to be automated, you need to have all of your joints named the same and arranged the same, with a few exceptions. If you look at the character definition tab of a character node you can see which ones are required and what they’re named. All the ones under Base are required and most people use all the ones under the Roll node and under the Auxiliary node as well. You can have up to 10 spine and neck joints (name them spine, spine1, spine2, or neck, neck1, neck2, etc).
I haven’t tried leaving out any roll joints, but I don’t use all the auxiliary joints and MB characterizes automatically just fine, I’d assume the rolls would be the same. If you want to name your joints differently, you can. You just have to set up the character manually (drag and drop the joints where you want them) the first time and then you can create a personalized template for all your other characters.
MB has a certain way it wants things set up, but if you have something like a thumb joint parented to the InHand joint instead of the Hand joint, it just gives a warning and continues to characterize.
“Does MB find out if there is a upper-arm rotation joint or lower leg rotation joint and does MB do its magic joint setup in accordance to the Maya setup?”
If the joints are named the same as what MB wants, yes. If you’ve set up a custom template and the joints are named the same as the template, yes.
“Will the MB Skeleton differ from the Maya-made after characterization?”
No, you want the skeleton to be exactly the same so that the animation transfers back to Maya. One joint being named differently between the Maya file and the MB file ruins everything.
“Would you do the facial animation in MB or in Maya? I tend to do it in Maya. Do you have any experience concerning facial animation?”
We’re doing in in MB. You can use it for mocap facial animation too. The thing I like about MB facial animation system is you can easily combine blendshapes and bones to make facial expressions. You can also combine multiple blendshapes, or use clusters. Overall, it’s a pretty cool system. Plus the realtime playback is really nice for the facial stuff and lipsync. Check out the Facial animation VTMs on 3DBuzz if you want to see how to set it up.
“Does the import/export Maya7.0/MB7.5 work?
Does the version of the Plu-In matters? If YES, do you have a working version combination?”
We haven’t gotten our copy of MB7.5 yet, we’re using Maya 7/MB 7.0. I’d assume it should work the same, but as soon as we get a copy of 7.5 up and running, I’ll be able to let you know. For the combination we’re using v2005.12 of the exporter, which was the latest version a few months ago. I haven’t checked to see if there’s a new version out there. Just check the Autodesk site and you should be able to find it.
I don’t use Cinema4D so I can’t help with your last question…sorry! Hope this helps!
Oooops! Sorry for that. Wasn’t sure. I have a friend who is spelled like you. 50/50 and I failed.
Do you have any tips out of your experience what errors or misunderstandings may occur in the process of handling files between Maya and MB? i like to try to make my next movie like that.
I know, that the real problems may arise when animating, but any general things.
Any no-go things like e.g. indirect binding? I think from MB you get every frame a complete mesh and so u cannot bind indirect another skin to the skeleton in maya. Am I right?
thnx for an answer.
Ahhh. by the way. May I contact you for my movie, if I have a question?
It’s OK, I’m used to it. In our field, it’s 90% guys anyway.
There’s plenty of problems that can come up between the two programs, but I’ll tell you the major ones I’ve come across. The ones that took me a couple of days to figure out. 
First thing…the exporter is not perfect. I’ve had it write a couple of corrupt files on me, and it’s usually something that I don’t catch until after I’ve set up the character in MB. Sometimes you just have no choice but to re-export and start over.
Second, if you watch the 3DBuzz VTMs like I did, Buzz says to parent the root node of the character to the Character_Ctrl node. DON’T do this. It renames all of your joints automatically and then you can’t transfer the animation back to Maya unless you manually rename each joint. If you don’t parent it, you will still be able to select the Character_Ctrl Node to translate and rotate your character, but if you want to scale it, you’ll have to grab your character root node from Maya. (We just make sure our characters are to scale before they go into MB)
Now the reason you don’t want MB to rename your joints is because you only want to do a merge of the FBX file to your Maya file. If you do a straight import, you’ll lose all your bump maps and specular maps on your textures. For whatever reason, FBX doesn’t handle those, so you have to merge the animation back to your original file. The joints absolutely have to be named the exact same thing in order for it to work, otherwise it imports a completely new skeleton.
The other major problem we’ve had is that every once in a while, Maya likes to add transform nodes above a joint chain when you parent it. If this happens, you have to delete the history on the root joint and reparent. If you leave the transform nodes in, MB will treat them like a bone…but they’ll be located at the origin.
Those are the major ones. I’m not quite sure if I understand what you were asking about indirect binding, so if you want to clarify that I can try to answer it. And you certainly can contact me if you have any questions. Just realize that I’m not even close to an expert, I’ve only been using the program for 5 months and got thrown into being in charge of the “pipeline” here. But I’ll certainly do what I can to help.
U might think u don’t know a lot but u helped me a huge step towards my movie. I apreciate your help. I think I need to dig a bit into to take a closer look at the things u mentioned. This will happen soon and I will tell u about my efforts.
Thanks so much for now
marcus
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