hi everybody,
I’m not a MotionBuilder user so this might be a very stupid question for most of you!
anyway, my question is, does motionbuilder have the ability to rigg the characters? I know it adds IK to the joints. but how about muscles and influenced objects which are usualy used in rigging in Maya?! are you supposed to rigg the character in maya before exporting to motionbuilder?! pleae help me understand this.
Thank you in advance.
I haven’t used much of a muscle system…but I’ll try to help here. If you want to do something like corrective blendshapes, you can set those up in MB, it just takes a character face and a relation constraint…if you’d like me to go into more detail I can.
Because I’m not real familiar with how to set up a muscle system in Maya, I’m not sure if you can do it in MB or not. There’s a lot of things you can recreate with a relation constraint or expression constraint in MB, so it could be possible. If you could give me an idea of how you do it, I might be able to help you figure it out.
But if you set up things like influence objects in Maya using expressions I would think you could set them up and when you reimport animation it should work just fine. MB won’t read the expressions, but since merging animation into your scene file should only affect your skeleton (in theory) and your skeleton would drive the influence objects, I would think it would work. You just wouldn’t be able to see the results of the influence objects in MB, but they’d be there when you render.
I know I wasn’t able to give definite answers…but I hope I helped a bit! 
Hi
thanks alot for the answer. what I meant by muscle system was just the combination use of infulence objects and sometimes blendshapes. that’s a term I use! sorry for misunderstanding.
that made sense to me actually… I have to rigg and set up my “muscle system” (influnced objects) in maya, then use MB just to animate, and then export the animation back to my maya character. right?
then are MB animating tools so different that you would take all this trouble!?
Yes, just set up your influence objects and corrective blends in Maya and then import to MB to animate. Don’t add IKs or rig controls though…just do the MEL scripts. If it won’t export to an FBX (I haven’t tried this, this is all a theory) try exporting it before all that stuff is applied. Then set up the muscle system before you import from MB.
It’s a matter of preference really. Some people swear by MB, others, like me, could take it or leave it. It has lots of benefits like real-time playback, clips, an automatic FK/IK rig, etc. But I find it adds some problems to a pipeline that you wouldn’t have if you just used Maya. Sometimes things that work fine in Maya break when they come back from MB for no apparent reason. As you get used to it those problems obviously reduce, but it still seems slightly problematic to me. Plus one of the major things that bothers me is that it is difficult to customize a rig.
I use motionbuilder to animate my c4d characters. c4d’s mocca is very disapointing when it comes to character animation and so motionbuilder has entered my production pipeline. I am not a big fan of using just one program for all my production, I think with experience I just got comfortable jumping around from program to program getting the results that I desired instead of wasting my time futzing with the million little bugs in those all-in-one packages… even the “best” are not entirely up-to-spec on all fronts even if the manual says otherwise…
after I rig my c4d mesh I send it into mb using the fbx format and then animate. mb is also very popular with mocap data retargetting, its pretty simple, you just need to “characterize” your rigged mesh in mb, which means selecting a minimum of corresponding bone/joint points by hand so you can retarget your motion cleanly onto your mesh. a fully rigged biped consists of approx 20 points only, it takes 2min. after the character animation is done, I export out to c4d using the handy fbx-plugin and inside c4d my character can be composited into the scene’s environment. to work this way I usually solve all of my shot layouts traditionally (outside of the computer) with regular paper and pencil and as a rule I try to spend as little time as possible trying to be creative inside the computer.
g’luck
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