I have started working in MB 2009 not even three months ago as a keyframe animator. I don;t work w mocap - I hear it works nicely there. Nevertheless as a keyframe animator I encounter certain issues and bugs. That is not uncommon in software, what is different this time though is the vast number. I already have 12 pages (!!!!) of notes on issues and bugs I have encountered in my workflow and it is growing literally every day. I don’t understand how this software can be marketed as a software for keyframe animation. It is not. The keyframe animation is at best an afterthought. Sigh.

First of all Mobu is marketed as an Mocap Tool and not as an keyframe Anim Tool.
But you can use it for keyframing and it does its job pretty fine.
Missing a lot what Maya has to offer for example, but one the other side has feature’s maya is dreaming of :)

Mobu’s Rig concepts are quite different from others. So it’s a little hard to get into it.
If you come from an other Anim Tool 3 Month of working with Mobu is nothing. Work a bit longer with Mobu and many of your issues will vanish. promised!

Maybe share your List before we discuss it further

So nice to have a reply :-)
I will write back ASAP. Too busy right now.

Hi,

I do both keyframing and mocap in Mobu and have to confess I have a love/hate relationship with the software.

The issue that REALLLY BUGS me, is the fact that the character controller doesn’t allow you to select FK nodes, only IK nodes.  Why can’t they have a toggle button that allows you to do that.  It would make things SO MUCH SIMPLER.

I really hate having to go into the schematic window just to select an FK node.  It’s a waist of time and really f*** with your mind.

Now, how hard can that be to change?

e1

to e1two:
Yeah, love/hate - that’s a very nice way to put it. So many nice things and so many dreadful things both in the same place. Kind of like living with a woman ;-))

About your issue:
I am not sure about the terminology (though I tried to search the so called “user guide” some time ago), but I think they call those effectors (correct me if i am wrong, pls), so I will use that term hoping we both mean the same thing.
I have the same problem but I have several solutions too. First of all I use handles to select anything partially hidden. Secondly I have the rig divided into groups (IMHO the only useful way to select anything in MB) and when IK effector covers the FK, thaht I want to select, I select the IK first, hide it with Sh+H, then work with FK effector. When I need to see the IK effector again, I hide/show the group it is part of. Alternatively I use the control panel to select the hidden IK effector and then work with it although it is hidden. Hope it helps :)

PH

to sublist:

First of all I can’t believe I am having a conversation about MB here :-) Isn’t this really a dead place for a chit-chat?

>First of all Mobu is marketed as an Mocap Tool and not as an keyframe Anim Tool.

That’s what I thought too and I’d accept it as such. I’d consider my keyframing in such an application to be a hack - trying to do a job the tool was not intended to do. Then I would bear the extra troubles w/o complaining. Nevertheless when you read this descriotion: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?id=13581855&siteID=123112
at least I get the idea that MB is intended for animating, not just mocap editing. That is why I expect it to do just that.

> But you can use it for keyframing and it does its job pretty fine.

I’d respectfully disagree on that. My opinion is that yes, you can animate in it but no, MB is not making it easy for you. It is like using the latest Photoshop versus using Deluxe Paint or Photoshop 2.5. You can draw in all, but it is going to be quite easier in one of them.

>Missing a lot what Maya has to offer for example, but one the other side has feature’s maya is dreaming of :)

Maya seems pretty powerful. I only did a bit of stuff in it but I did a lot of animation in Max (many years in fact). That’s a pretty general tool, not really an animator’s dream tool by far. Still I miss how refined it was a lot. I also agree that MB has some very nice features. For example something that you probably take for granted coming from Maya is Viewport/Viewer navigation with Ctrl/Shift/… + LMB. Max does not have that natively (must purchase a plugin) and it is something really nice to have and something you get to love very quickly.

>Mobu’s Rig concepts are quite different from others. So it’s a little hard to get into it.

You could say that again especially since I come from using Max’s biped which was very, very, very, very, very simple rig to use. Despite its simplicity I animated characters for several successful games with it.

As far as MB’s rig - I am still not convinced it is well executed/thought out. I give it a benefit of a doubt though as I have only several months of experience with it. Still I think the reason why everybody struggles with it at first is the inexcusably incredibly poor “user guide” that comes with MB.

>If you come from an other Anim Tool 3 Month of working with Mobu is nothing. Work a bit longer with Mobu and many of your issues will vanish. promised!

When I think of it I have survived almost 4 months of work already :-) Having a really great job helped a lot of course :-) That is the irony of it all. This very troublesome MB has brought me a great job that I love. Oh well, that’s life I guess. A lot of irony.

I am certainly aware of the fact that I need more experiences to judge MB fully and fairly. I am not sure the issues I have with it will vanish though. So far the best I get is that I find workarounds, but we will see. I am open minded.

>Maybe share your List before we discuss it further

All 13 pages? :-)) I would not do that to you :-))) You see, I only write those notes when I need to relieve stress and anxiety. It is more of a therapy. So every note is pierced with harsh and satirical comments. It helps me calm down when I encounter another one of them stumbling blocks. It would probably make for a very depressing read though :-(

If you want to see what kind of issues I have noted down though, I will clean some up for you. They are not the biggest problems I deal with, just some random choices. BTW though English is obviously not my native language, i do keep my notes in English just to torture myself a bit :-) Constant training never hurts, right?

I will post something ASAP, have to gor ight now

Cheers!
:-)
PH

I recomend anyone that is having trouble keyframing or using MotionBuilder for the first time go check out the the http://motionbuildertraining.blo...-understanding-reach.html post on my blog.  It will help a good deal. Also there are lots of links and resources on the blog that are free that should get you up to speed.  Most of the issues people have with it are the defaults and once you get in and play a bit with the rig it gets much easier.

Brad Clark
Co-Founder: Rigging Dojo-Teaching the art and science of character rigging
Author: Inspired 3D Advanced Rigging
The Character Animator Toolkit for Motionbuilder :available now:

to Brad Clark:
Thanks for sharing your experiences with MB. I will check it out for sure. It’s not like there is a surplus of resources on MB out there :-)

PH

to sublist:

Hi again - that is if you are still with me :-) Please accept my apology for my late follow-up. I have been tremendously busy.

I have promised you some examples of the issues that I have with MB. I have kind of given up writing everything down. No need to relieve anxiety anymore. Kind of take the trouble for granted now. Don’t expect much from MB anymore. Since I am so bitter about MB I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I don’t blame people who are coding it. I blame MB related executives who decide what will be done, I blame Autodesk’s highest executives who set the direction of the development and I obviously blame the fact that publicly traded companies work the way they do - for short term gain.

So which notes should I put here?

MB user guide: extremely poor. do I need to point out examples?
MB user interface: unfinished. Again - any example needed? I don’t think so, but ask me if you want to.

MB itself - darn, I just don’t feel like writing about it. Okay, here we go.

A new one I am typing just for you today. Got to do some mocap cleaning. MB is supposed to be made for that, right? So how do I pin a hand/foot in the world coordinates when I have multiple layers? Sure we can pin anything in the base layer, but what if there are several layers of motion and then, in the final level, I want to pin a palm in the world space? I believe there is no solution for that but I will be very happy to learn I am wrong.

Random stuff from my notes (edited my bi*ching with xxx) - please feel free to correct me if I am wrong anywhere.

Redo: you never know when you cannot redo any more.
Undo/Redo: you are not shown what function you will be undo/redoing (as in max for example) and since not all actions are undo/redoable, it makes it difficult to use undo/redo function.
This is also very unpleasant for tracking bugs and problematic issues. When you catch a bug in your undo-redo history, you cannot easily see what caused it because you don’t see the undo-redo action name.

Character Control
There is no way to clean up T/R pinning on all IK effectors at once. One needs to turn them off by hand and then one can set up a new pinning.
Pinning setups cannot be saved to be reused quickly.

FCurves:
New layers are scene based, not character based. When you add a new layer to your scene, this layer can hold keys to any number of characters. This layer also appears for every character in the scene. So for example if you have five layers adjusting the limbs of your male character and ten layers adjusting the head of your female character, all fifteen layers will appear when you work with fcurves of each of the characters. xxx

When there are fcurves of more than one effector/bone displayed, there is no way to tell which fcurve or which key belongs to what effector/bone. Emergency solution is to change colors of your fcurves which is not fast enough to be used as a part of a normal workflow. xxx

Fcurves: when you select several keys that have different parameters (e.g. different TCB/Continuity), the right side of the fcurves window shows the last edited values, not the values the keys actually have (e.g. gray if there are different values). !!!!!!!

When moving keys in the fcurves window it does not show the current difference from the starting position which is very useful when you want to move several keys not at once (because they belong to different effectors and you simply cannot do that easily). You movem one key, see how it looks in the viewport, check the difference you moved it by, then release the LMB and proceed on moving the other keys. Oxxxul.
When you scale keys using the thick arrows indicating a selection on the ruler noe percentage og the scale is given. xxxSee also *0510

:)
PH

lots to cover here, some of your issues are very valid and have been problems in mobu and others, I always liked the MAX undo/redo stack display as well.

Pin across layers, layers don’t matter to AUX ctrls or using extra lock down key at time keys on the top layer.

@global layers, don’t use so many layers.... I don’t ever use more than one or two layers in the way I work and even if I did want more layers, it gets complicated to keep them all organized. Same with Maya per attribute layers.  Try just baking down to a new take and keep using the same layers but name each layer for what character your keyframing.  If you truly need to keep the character edits seperate you can use story and the sub tracks. 

I think this is just a workflow change that you need to play with more to see how you can speed up the effects.

@pinning- no way with out code to store pin sets but you can quickly select all ctrls and with hotkeys or the buttons unpin/pin them in groups.  or use Q to temp unpin then just key in body part mode so you can get the effect of keeping legs pinned for example but still be able to free pose the rest of the character with Q. 

Pin sets would be great though and I have asked for them for a very, very long time.  *can be done via python.

Fcurves-moving keys- use the buffer curve if you want to keep a ghost of the last value. 

To be honest I so rarely use the fcruve editor and do all my edits/tweaks in the view port that the fcruve issues are not an issue so much but I understand your frustration with them.

but with your “ shows last edited/not key values” if you grab lots of keys the editor couldn’t show you each value since it would be a mix of values- what fcurve editor have you used that you can select diffrent keyframes and it shows you their separate values? Not sure I understand this, screen grab would help.

Brad Clark
Co-Founder: Rigging Dojo-Teaching the art and science of character rigging
Author: Inspired 3D Advanced Rigging
The Character Animator Toolkit for Motionbuilder :available now:

Hi and thanks for writing back. Sorry for late reply, too much work.

BTW that video course that you have recommended was shown to me when I started working with MB as a part of my crash course :-) It is pretty good, though one gets the feeling that the guys could tell you so much more should they have enough time. Also very funny to hear one of them describe his key-on-each-frame approach to hand animation :-) I mean it is great if it works for him, no problem with that, but for me, that is like the worst dream ever :-) But it is a pretty good course. Certainly better that the other videos that use the word “cool” five times every minute about everything ("MB can use mouse, isn’t that exciting and cool? Yes it is so cool, Buzz")

>Pin across layers, layers don’t matter to AUX ctrls or using extra lock down key at time keys on the top layer.

I am not very familiar with AUXes, but I will look into them now (or rather when I have any time whatsoever). What is the other thing though? “extra lock down key at time keys”? Could not find anything like that in the “user guide”. Could you please explain it a little bit?

>@global layers, don’t use so many layers.... I don’t ever use more than one or two layers in the way I work and even if I did want more layers, it gets complicated to keep them all organized. Same with Maya per attribute layers.  Try just baking down to a new take and keep using the same layers but name each layer for what character your keyframing.  If you truly need to keep the character edits seperate you can use story and the sub tracks.

This is about the layers being global, not character-base, right? I am sorry, but it just does not make any sense to me. Sure, we can find a workaround, but why being forced to? Or why not using layers? Even baking them does not help. If I have keys for several characters on layer 1 and bake it, I do it for all characters. But what if I only need it for one? OK, merge selected etc, but why? Or name layers in a way that makes it clear which character they belong to? Unnecessarily complicated and prone to cause a problem or a mistake once in a while. Having layers for each character makes so much more sense to me. It is just safer, easier and faster.

>I think this is just a workflow change that you need to play with more to see how you can speed up the effects.

Oh boy, am I adjusting heavily :-)

>@pinning- no way with out code to store pin sets but you can quickly select all ctrls and with hotkeys or the buttons unpin/pin them in groups.  or use Q to temp unpin then just key in body part mode so you can get the effect of keeping legs pinned for example but still be able to free pose the rest of the character with Q.

Could you be more specific about using hotkeys here, please?

>Fcurves-moving keys- use the buffer curve if you want to keep a ghost of the last value.

I am not sure what this is about. The difference when you move a key? It’s actually in max. You just move they keys, watch the result and when you like it, before you release the LMB, you check a little number that tells you that you have moved the keys, say 11 frames so you can repeat it on other objects if you need to. It’s not a big deal, but it is useful sometimes. Nice feature. Won’t be part of MB ever IMHO. (pessimism takes me over)

>To be honest I so rarely use the fcruve editor and do all my edits/tweaks in the view port that the fcruve issues are not an issue so much but I understand your frustration with them.

Interesting. I can’t imagine animating w/o them. :-) I respect your workflow, make no mistake about it, I find it nicely amusing how everyone finds a different way of coping with animating. Never ceases to surprise me.

>but with your “ shows last edited/not key values” if you grab lots of keys the editor couldn’t show you each value since it would be a mix of values- what fcurve editor have you used that you can select diffrent keyframes and it shows you their separate values? Not sure I understand this, screen grab would help.

When you select multiple keys, obviously you cannot show all their values. The problem with MB is that it shows values even when other keys are selected making it easy for you to make wrong assumption sooner or later.

Gotta run back to work, will be glad to chat more. Cheers and g’luck!

PH