Character Studio Biped to Motionbuilder - what's the workflow?

#1

hi guys,

is it possible to use the Biped when exporting your character from Max to Motionbuilder?

or do you have to start creating the skeleton from scratch?

#2

Animation in Motionbuilder uses the Motionbuilder control rig, it doesn’t use standard rigs, so no, you wouldn’t use biped. That said it’s not like you have to build the control rig from scratch, as you suggest. You import your skeleton into Motionbuilder then you ‘Characterize’ it, which is basically where you label your bones so that motionbuilder knows that they are parts of a human rather than just random bones.

Basically, when you import a skeleton into Motionbuilder, as far as it’s concerned it doesn’t know whether those bones are a human, a horse, a tree, or whatever else, it just sees bones. When you characterize it it’s saying, “ok, now you’ve told me that these bones are arms, these bones are the spine, these bones are legs, etc, I understand the relationships between those bones and know how they should work, so I can automatically build rig controls for you and let you use all the useful stuff like poses, motion blending, pasting motion from one character to another, etc etc.”

If you’ve named the bones in your skeleton in a way that motionbuilder understands then characterizing is a pretty automatic process. Otherwise you can simply drag and drop the bones in your skeleton into slots in a graph that correspond to body parts. Once your character is characterized it can automatically build the control rig for you which actually works in quite a similar way to the biped skeleton.

Hope that’s helped you out. Feel free to post any follow up questions.

#3

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