Lightwave and Motionbuilder Together

[Visnarel]

Here is a short demonstration of a lightwave scene done by using Motionbuilder motion data. It is 28 megs so it will be a long download, I would suggest right-clicking and "saving as"

http://www.destinyofdarkness.com/Fight_Scene.avi

It's an AVI so sorry Mac users

[Cageman]

Wow!! That is amazing!!! :) Really good moves. Have you used some kind of motioncapture?

Keep up the good work!!

[Visnarel]

Yes, it's part of a 5 minute short film, two people were motion captured doing a fight scene, there are 4 more segments to it. Then cleaned up in motionbuilder, models in lightwave, animated in motionbuilder, rendered in lightwave.

All for a production team involved in DVGarage's Pixel Corps

[oxyg3n]

That looks really good. Could you tell me about motionbuilder? I keep hearing about it lately but have no idea what it is, what it does.

[Visnarel]

Motionbuilder is primarily a Bi-Ped animation tool, it has no modeling tools and it has a minimal rendering capability, however it is unmatched in it's ability to animate Bi-Ped (humanoid) characters... It also has an extensive set of tools for converting motion capture data into it's native control rig to attach models to optical data.

Motionbuilder also has a long list of tools for doing facial animation, including real time voice syncing, phoenetics animation...etc...

It also has a long list of motion blending and matching, you can take any other motion builder file to control a motionbuilder character of any scale.

Included are tools for making video game animations and blending

Essentially it does one thing Animating Bi-Ped's and it does it better than any tool that I've used before...

Hope this helps...

[oxyg3n]

Yeah that clears things up thanks. Oh one more thing, is it a plugin for lw or a stand alone program?

[Visnarel]

It's a standalone program from Kaydara, it doesn't just work with lightwave, it works with many other packages as well, there is a lightwave plugin that moves the motion back and forth...

[hrgiger]

As I understand it, Motionbuilder works pretty much in real time. Boy, that would be nice. Animating in LW currently, can be a little slow depending on your scene/setups.
How does it work? Do you have to rig it first in Lightwave? And with the Lightwave plug-in, does it export a scene that you can load back into Lightwave? I wouldn't be interested in the motion capture as much as just general animating.

[infinity3d]

Are there any sites, tutorials that deal with Motion builder and lightwave?? Specifically with the process from rigging in lightwave and sending to MB??

[Zarathustra]

That's F-ing great! Yeah, Motionbuilder is the big thing going right now. I don't know the first thing about dealing with motion capture files, so it's another plus if MB handles that effortlessly.

Getting back to your animation, that specular hit on the floor is like a nuclear blast. You gotta get that under control. Nothing I could say bad about the movement.

btw - Mac can handle avi. We can even handle divx! Ain't that something?!

[jin'a]

nice animation!

thought i saw some mergers beween the two characers! thats the only crit!

[Rei]

Motion Builder was free (6 quid) with Digit last month, so you could order a back copy to get it. Its for freelancers only commercial but anyone can use it just for fun.

[intofx]

Very cool. The only thing I would say is that there is a kick that makes "contact" towards the end of the fight that looks like the actor doing the capture for you anticipated. At that point, the fight looks like two stunt men hitting their marks rather that a "real" fight. I wonder if you had a different camera angle if we wouldn't see the air between the foot and the face being hit.

I am only ably to make this criticism because the motion of the characters is so good it allows such analysis. But a real kick with contact would be awesome - after all nobody gets hurt. :)

Matt

[Visnarel]

Wow... I had a little crisis last night and I come back to a lot of responses :)

As far as Motionbuilder goes...

Setting up characters for motion builder is a simple task of naming your bones in a specific way. This isn't completely required, however it makes "characterizing" a more simple task. The easiest way is to setup 2 bones per segment, meaning on the upper arm you have a rotation bone and a pivot bone, lower arm the same etc... The IK FK chain is automatically configured in Motionbuilder, so all you have to do in LW is the weightmap setup. But even there MB is very gentle. The default setups usually work pretty good. Once my character was modeled the entire transition into MB and back to LW was about 5 minutes. And yes, each one of these models was 48k poly's and both of them were working in real time in Motionbuilder...

The bright hits are somewhat intentional, I have an HDR map lighting the scene (with some regular lights for effect) and honestly it was just a test render of the bots for a class, but it looked pretty good so I thought I'd post it here... The floor is a little too reflective, so it enhances the hit even more...

As far as the workflow goes, Motionbuilder only moves Motion data to and from Lightwave (currently, may be able to move objects as well later) so you have to make your object in lightwave first, rig them, send them to motionbuilder, manipulate them there, and import the motion back into Layout. It's a little odd at first, but once you get used to it, it works pretty good. Since MB has a common control rig that works with any model it makes setting things up very easy...

This is the first proof of pipeline for this project, so the model contacts aren't even close to being finished yet, since the camera moves around the model, you don't see a bunch of the issues that you would see at close up. The robots are bigger in the arms than regular humans so some adjustments are needed...

Buzz3d has a set of Motionbuilder tutorials up for free, I think they are linked from Kaydara's website... and Kaydara has a TON of tutorials on their site...

I hope I got everyone's questions...

[js33]

Originally posted by Rei
Motion Builder was free (6 quid) with Digit last month, so you could order a back copy to get it. Its for freelancers only commercial but anyone can use it just for fun.


The free motionbuilder is in the June issue of Digit.
I just checked my bookstore and they don't even have the June issue yet just the May.
The Motionbuilder is free for 1 year then can be turned into a permanent copy for $200.

Cheers,
JS

[js33]

Originally posted by Visnarel
Here is a short demonstration of a lightwave scene done by using Motionbuilder motion data. It is 28 megs so it will be a long download, I would suggest right-clicking and "saving as"

http://www.destinyofdarkness.com/Fight_Scene.avi

It's an AVI so sorry Mac users

That is lookin pretty sweet. But my question is couldn't you have just loaded the mocap data into LW or does MB allow you to tweak the motion easier than it would be in LW?

Cheers,
JS

[Visnarel]

MB is far better for cleaning up, blending and tweaking motion data, you can fix the optical data, before it gets applied to the model

[Remi]

You can download kaydara's MotionBuilder for free till july 1st...it's the PE 1yr annual license there giving away...so get over there and get it...and then go to 3dbuzz.com and register and go to the download section and get the vtm tutorials about it....Nice work btw...I believe that motion is used in the vtm intros...great stuff:D

[SeptemberSnow]

Motionbuilder for Macs. In checking the Motionbuilder website I see that the program is available for OSX as well as PC's.

Does anyone know if the Motionbuilder contained on the Digit CD has the Mac OSX version?

[SeptemberSnow]

Originally posted by Remi
You can download kaydara's MotionBuilder for free till july 1st

I've looked everywhere for a download site at Kaydara.com and I can't find it. Can you post the address of the download page?

Thanks

[Solid Image Art]

You can download Motion Builder for FREE from this link (if I paste it right). -Dan

Motion Builder for FREE - click here (http://www.kaydara.com/mailing/FBXQT_survey/index.html)