Hello, I’m pretty much new with Motionbuilder. I’ve gotten a fully-rigged character on Motionbuilder and animated it by key framing the body effectors. However, when I try to modify the FCurves on the graph editor, the curves modify but the animation on the screen stays the same.
What should I do?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Cleroth,
When you set keys to the effectors it’s adding a layer. The body effectors are IK but the oringial data is located on the FK. And when you try adjusting the fcurves you’re editing the IK layer, not the original FK motion. If you go into your Navigator under Scenes and open up the tab for your character to view the FK bones (or hit Ctrl A a couple times to see FK bones in the viewport) you can adjust the original motion data by selecting anything that isn’t named “so-and-so-effector”.
If you want to keep the adjustments you made with the effector keys that you set then try plotting all the animation to the take or you can plot it to the skeleton and work on the fcurves from there on.
Hope this helps!
Thanks a lot! It does work when I select the things between the effectors. 
One thing though, when I plot the animation, the curves are keyed every frame, is there a way to avoid this by only having keys on the ones I set earlier?
When you plot your animation either on the take or on the skeleton/control rig it takes any key you’ve made and turns it into the new ‘original’ data (which is a key on everyframe). As far as I know there’s no way of splitting these up.
You might want to try adjusting the fcurves before making any changes and adding keys with the IK/effectors. But if you prefer to work the other way around, you’ll be adjusting the orginial data and most likely your new effector keys will be affected by those changes since they’re a layer ontop of the original data, and you’ll be having to reset the effector’s keys to the way you wanted them BEFORE you made changes to the fcurves. (I hope I didn’t jumble that up too much, haha)
Choosing a workflow is much different for MotionBuilder than if you’re using Maya, Max or any other software to animate in. It might take a few files before you find a workflow that fits your wants/needs.
Hi, if you do a quick search on this through the forum you will find lots of other threads of people having the same problem and also my answers to them.
Test out the reach settings, (ik/fk blend) figure out what state you want to be in and then edit those contorls.
play with reach, do a quick search on the forum.
Brad
Sorry for posting a question that was already answered. I had indeed searched if it had been answered before but I just noticed the forum was only showing threads up to last month.
Thanks anyway, Brad. I hadn’t noticed the IK/Aux blending in the FCurves properties.
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