How to pose facial joints

#1

Hey Guys,

I recently attended quite an intense master course in motionbuilder lectured by david coleman of EA Games at Melbourne, Australia. Unfortunately though, he simply went through the material too fast and I had trouble keeping notes.

Added to this fact, I’ve never used motionbuilder before in my life so it didn’t help the situation at all, and I walked out of the course feeling like I know less about the software than when I went in.

I was wondering if any of you knew of the way that you setup facial joints in motionbuilder using controller objects to drive the face movements. Honestly though, I don’t even need the control objects, all I need at the moment is to create facial poses, and be able to blend between them simillarly to how I would if I were to create blendshapes and blend between them. So I’ve got a scene, and I’d like to position the joints, but my initial problem is that when I go to position the joints, once the character has been characterized, the facial joints are locked and I can’t move them, rotate them or scale them.

Any help would be much appreciated.

By the way, The joints and the face are already in motionbuilder, it’s just the following steps that I’m having trouble with.

-Gabe

#2

HI ,

a few quick pointers to get you going.

one , mobu default locks the joints of skeleton that is chracterized, the face might be locked, you can look under the character contorl (little guy window) menus and turn off the lock trs skeleton.

second, look up the help file for chracter face, it will let you do what you want. I talk about iit in the masterclass DVD we have for sale but the help docs cover it just fine if you don’t want to spend any money.

3rd, good luck, mobu is not as easy or as hard as it first apears, read over the help files and read over the posts here and on the-area.com as there are lots of posts dealking with most of this stuff all ready.

Brad

#3

Hello, Gabester,

Sometimes I notice that MB locks bones once a skeleton is characterized. You have to close it and open again - and you can rotate and position the bones again. Perhaps this is not your case, but things happen…

#4

Thanks for the help Anna and Bclark. That character rts thingy did work. I was able to create my facial expressions. All was working fine, untill I had to convert an animation from one character skeleton to another.

I fbx plugin imported the other character skeleton, characterized it, saved out the file, applied it to my original character by dragging the animation I’ve previously exported into my story window, then plotted the animation to my skeleton. Now, when I attempt to bake from my skeleton back to my control rig, MB tells me that it’s complete, but I can’t move any of the keys, or the control objects. It won’t let me move them anywhere. Even though I’m on layer one. I’m not sure if this layer system has anything to do with it. I do know that the joint animations are now sitting on the base layer due to the bake. I thought that It’s possible to bake an animation, then layer some keys over it on another layer, but that’s not proving to be the case.

This locking thing is getting to me. Why must everything be autolocked? Does anyone have some suggestions?

#5

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