MotionBuilder

What do you like best?

MotionBuilder is one of my favorite apps. Affectionately known as "Mobu" (Moo-boo) was created by an Oscar award winning team back in 2003. It's very mature, and stable app that falls in the Autodesk suite of tools as a real-time Motion Capture. It was used for AVATAR . There really isn't anything better on the market for fast, ease of use, humanoid and quadruped "Motion Capture/ MoCap". I also love it for keyframing but with the amount of free MoCap" available that use .FBX animation file transfer standard, I often only have to tweak the mocap with a few keyframes. However, it is the best "real-time" animator. Real time animation is something you can't understand until you experience it.

MotionBuilder FBX allows MoCap data from most if not all animation apps via FBX. Mobu uses something called HumanIK or HIK for short. HIK allows instant rigging of most bipedal character with an very intuitive yet powerful rig. So your character model can be rigged and animated in less than an hour with an Auto-Rigger like Mixamo, or Maya Quick Rig and motion can be drag/dropped and you have a performance for games or films. This is a life-save for those who need to get things animated quickly or have already put a lot of energy in other parts of the process, like modeling and texturing.

What do you dislike?

Being a Mac User I dislike like MotionBuilder being discontinued after version 7.5. Probably over ten years ago, but Mobu is so useful I continued to used it on the Mac and only switched to Window in BootCamp when I was in full production.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Eventhough there is a lot of free training on YouTube, get Pluralsight or a trainer.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

EvenThough I own an OptiTrack MoCap system for performance capture, I use MotionBuilder even without MocCap and with regular keyframes. I also use it with Endorphin, a now discontinued Ragdoll simulator, so I can produce very physics-based performances with keyframing.

I'm the first vendor to use the local University robotics Mocap lab for human animation. So I would able to put on a MoCap suit, generate animation C3D optical marker files and format my captured body movements to a Maya character with MotionBuilder. So eventhough I have a OptiTrack system, the school has a Vicon capture volumes but both setups worked with MotionBuilders Actor for HumanIK Control Rigs. This solved a huge expensive problem for the University that only used tracking markers instead of an expensive mocap formatting software.