We’ve tried over the last months to get 2012 working on several machines as an attempt to solve what looks like a critical windowing related bug with Motion Builder 2012.
While the application runs fine in other respects (fully functional viewport and general operation), BUT simply de-maximizing the main window, or trying to move the main application window, and other basic WINDOW-RELATED operations like having a file merge browser window open, the application stalls for 30 seconds or so - pretty much ‘taking over’ being able to do anything else on the computer, and making the release inoperable in a practical sense.
This is a bug that I’ve reported to our distributor, also submitted as a bug to autodesk, and also asked around if others are having a similar problem - and it seems to me this is a critical one but going un-noticed on this forum.
So I ask if anyone is having this issue, and where I can go from here.

The graphic card I’m using is the ATI 5870, and I guess it’s not certified 100%. Though in all years using motion builder - really there have been no consumer cards I’ve come across which really prevent from being able to use the software fairly flawlessly.

I hear comments from people on this list that Motion Builder is ‘buggy’ software. Actually it’s the most robust, bug-free animation software I’ve ever come across and not at all indicating that there’s something flakey about the new realease. It does seem however that some critical GUI-related error has leaked through into this release that is going to prevent many, many people from getting up and running with the latest version.

Thanks for any pointers to get me up and running, and any feedback with similar stories.

Hi Ethan,

I’ve had a quick look at my cards Open GL settings and noticed I’ve got a checkbox for ‘enable triple buffering’. This solves the problem completely.

So thank you very much for your suggests ! Seems to me that triple buffering might be a requirement for usage of the software at this point. But that’s a quick simple assumption of course.

I can’t see any ‘predefined settings’ for Motion Builder in my catalyst ATI settings. Of course I should really have an nvidia in there since I use the physX functionality quite a bit in production. Luck of the draw I’ve got the setup I have right now.

So thanks again immensely !!

Yeah I use Mudbox and Maya regularly on the same Windows platform and they operate quite well. Motion Builders new QT-gtk windowing is great to see happen. There seem to be a lot of usage attention given to the various areas of the GUI - which has always been the stickler point for fast general operation of the program for production (like doing more than using the software as an animation processing tool).

I’ve never attempted to write tools with a GUI for Motion Builder. I’ve done a lot of python scripting for various processing tasks, as well as rendering routines (batching takes, rendering passes and scene modifications during the rendering stage).

I’d guess that the QT conversion is going to make tools with GUI’s much more of a pleasant coding task.

-Kristian