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Kaydara Motionbuilder 5 Pro

Aug 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By S. D. Katz

Software Successfully Reaches Out to a Broader Market

Kaydara's Motionbuilder version 5 is a hefty release of the premiere motion capture editing tool. As we go to press, Alias announced the acquisition of Kaydara, along with the debut of version 6. However, the main thrust of the software was determined in version 5, as Kaydara began to move Motionbuilder beyond mo-cap editing and to optimize their powerful toolset for keyframe character animation.

An overview of Motionbuilder features three main strengths: First, the most complete set of tools available for editing motion capture data and keyframed animation. Two, a nonlinear animation workflow, and three, an extremely fast realtime architecture.

MB5 is meant to be complementary to other animation applications, which is why FBX was developed. FBX is an animation interchange format that allows character rigs and geometry to be moved between the top animation programs. This is no mean feat. For years, there have been file formats that tried to do this, but ultimately failed to account for the wide range of data that makes up a scene file. FBX supports animation, deformations, lighting, texture maps, and UV coordinates as well as NURBS and polygonal models. With Alias' acquisition, FBX will continue to be offered as a vendor-neutral format.

To check the level of support provided by FBX in any two animation programs go to http://www.kaydara.com/products/fbx/index.php?filename=compat. This is Kaydara's interactive compatibility chart that allows you to select the application you want to export from and then select the target application (it does not have to be MB5). While FBX does not support all scene attributes for all programs, many key attributes are supported, making this the most comprehensive interchange format available.

FBX is part of Motionbuilder and helps make it a companion program to other animation systems, even though it can be used as a standalone app for animation. Typically, you would create a model and character rig in a program like Maya or Max and move the character into MB5 to apply or edit mo-cap data or even traditional keyframe data. After the MB5 motion editing is completed, you would return to the first program or move onto yet another animation application for final rendering. The reason you would not work entirely in MB5 is that it has no modeler, and even though it has a particle system and rendering options, these are not areas of strength for MB5. Most of the lighting and rendering features are intended for previz.

First Steps

MB5 was made to animate characters. As with any animation program, this process consists of first rigging a character and then adding motion. In MB5, animation can be mo-cap data, keyframe data, or a combination of both.

Motionbuilder provides all the familiar advanced animation tools such as a dope sheet, keyframe reduction, IK and FK blending, and other keyframing functionality, but adds a nonlinear editing environment to allow adjustments on top of existing animation without changing the original animation.

An example of this non-destructive approach would be a motion capture file of a dance move applied to a character. In MB5 you could apply an adjustment layer on top of the dance move, for instance, a stretch. You would be able to extend an arm or leg to create a new animation while the underlying motion is unaffected.

One of the most basic and powerful functions of any mo-cap editor is re-targeting, which consists of taking animation for one character and applying it to another. Because mo-cap data is recorded from a live actor, the actor can be considered the first character, and in a sense, the character rig. That motion may be applied to an alien model that has a very different body type than the actor. In the past, this was a real problem and produced all sorts of motion anomalies that were difficult to correct. MB5's algorithms have all but eliminated these problems. Re-targeting is defined in the Pose Control window with simple dropdown menus to select source and target rigs and much of the time it's that simple to set up. This is the type of mo-cap editing that made Filmbox the standard in effects studios.

One of the new, very powerful motion editing tools in MB5 is the Time Warp feature. A Time Warp is essentially an envelope that is added to an F-curve. Again, this is a non-destructive layer that does not change the underlying F-curve, but allows you to change the timing of an action by speeding it up, slowing it down, or reversing direction. For “fitting” animation to a timed track or music, this is a very fast solution, particularly for previsualization.

Another great enhancement is the addition of quadrupeds and floor detection for feet and hands. This is a huge time-saver since hands and feet now react to the ground plane, which normally would have to be keyframed by hand. Since you might have up to four legs with several toes each to adjust, letting MB5 do the work is great. Also new are multi-bone neck rigs, for creatures like a brontosaurus or giraffe.

MB5 also has several sophisticated solutions for pinning and reaching. Pinning is a situation when a character places a hand or foot on a surface and transfers weight. This can be a real problem for an IK rig because rigs understand a specific hierarchy that is difficult to alter. Most rigs understand that the feet are at the bottom of the IK chain, and so when you move the body or limbs, the feet don't slide around. So when a character lifts himself up by the hands and then the feet are adjusted, the rig will move the hands, which should actually be stationary.

An example is a character who puts his hand on a railing while walking. That's a simple description of a complex problem and relates to most actions that shift or share load-bearing with the feet. MB5 has a very sophisticated toolset for these types of situations, including the ability to switch between FK and IK, control pinning by locking translation and rotation separately for selected effectors, and Reach and Pull IK effector controls that allow for pinning without completely locking the limb in position. This is a short description of a very sophisticated IK implementation.

Realtime

Animators rely on instant feedback. One of the dirty secrets of character animation in the digital realm is that IK rigs tend to slow down even fast workstations. Over the years, artists have used simple skeletal representations of characters, which means that you don't see the body of a character until you render out a quick test. Since weight is an extremely important part of animation, you are really flying blind when you don't see the full mass of a character. Clothing and props all add to the performance, but most animation programs cannot display these in realtime when an animator scrubs through the animation timeline.

When it comes to realtime display, MB5 smokes the competition. The software allows realtime playback of particle effects, shadows, and motion blur. MB5 is the only program that I have seen play back multiple characters using OpenGL. Can you slow MB5 down to a crawl with a heavy scene? Of course, but the thresh-old is substantially higher compared to the competition.

Story Window

Perhaps the single most important new feature in MB5 is the Story Window. This is a comprehensive Timeline interface where you can access and edit just about all aspects of your project sequence. This is a nonlinear environment and resembles the layout in Final Cut Pro or Avid. Here you can access cameras, lights, characters, audio, and commands — all in their own track. Tracks can be cut and pasted, blended and faded. At the top of the interface there is a shot track for multiple cameras so you can set up a sequence in an animation scene and cut between views in the style of a live camera setup.

This powerful command center is the perfect environment for previsualization, and in fact, the toolset was designed just for that use as employed by the visual effects team on The Matrix. Motionbuilder was the hub for all sorts of data and video feeds that could not be mixed live in a traditional NLE on-set. This capability is unique to MB.

MB5 would not be complete as an animation system without in-depth facial animation tools, and the latest facial mo-cap features are supported. The coolest of these is the new word recognition feature, Voice Reality. This is essentially audio-driven, automatic animation based on user-defined phonemes. Voice Reality works with WAV files or live audio. Once a character is assigned to the track, the software analyzes the words and sets the mouth movements. There are filters and controls to weight the expression, and the results are fairly good for automatic animation. Still, really good lip synch has to be hand done, so this is useful for previz or background characters. To be fair, it's conceivable that a coarser style of animation could use Voice Reality for final animation, but that would be an exception.

There are several smaller new features, such as the ability to assign colors to F-curves as well as tangent weighting to gain better control over curves. New keyboard layouts also have been supplied that emulate the keyboards of Maya, 3ds Max, and XSI. This is a big help to animators adding Motionbuilder to an existing pipeline. At the same time, Kaydara could have made this emulation feature even better if it were combined with more keyboard customization since most artists develop their own keyboard shortcuts.

Not to shortchange the overall package, MB5 has a long list of other features, including a particle system, robust shading and support for several types of light, depth of field rendering, and most of the options associated with general-purpose animation programs. While MB is rarely the rendering solution for final output, it also has a good production renderer allowing interim previsualization tests to impart the mood and material texture of a scene. Years of use in top visual effects studios have made Motionbuilder's long list of features battle tested for professionals who need to have things work as promised.

Conclusion

Motionbuilder defined motion capture editing and now hopes to leverage its expertise into the broader area of keyframe character animation. At the same time, its designers are trying to migrate down from the high-end professional market to general animators. From a feature perspective — the most important element — MB5 has the goods. It is a great tool with a reasonably steep learning curve, largely because the documentation is very basic. The manual is little more than a description of each feature. Clearly the assumption is that the software is being used by a seasoned tech director. However, Kaydara has added Certified Courseware on DVD ($139) that covers the basic use of the program. MB5 is available for Windows 2000, Windows XP, or OS X 10.2 and later.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.