When you have brought a character model into MotionBuilder and set it up for animation, there are three different types of motion sources you can use to animate the character: A Control
rig, an Actor connected to motion data, or another character.
For more information on characters and setting up a character for animation, see Character setup.
The overall workflow for animating characters in MotionBuilder can be summarized as follows:
- Create a character model in your 3D package of choice and save it using the .fbx file format. (To do this, you need to have the appropriate FBX plug-in installed.)
- Load your character model in MotionBuilder.
- Complete the Character mapping process and characterize the character model. See Character mapping and Characterizing.
- Select the type of source you want to drive the character model. The motion source can be a Control rig, another character,
or motion data attached to an Actor asset. See Selecting a motion source.
- Edit the animation by creating a Control rig and plotting the animation from the motion source to the Control rig. See Creating a Control rig and Plotting animation to a Control rig.
You can also use the Control rig alone to create poses and set keyframes to animate it.
- Refine your animation data with editing and filtering. See Refining animation.
- Plot animation from the Control rig to your model’s skeleton to prepare it for export. See Plotting animation to a character’s skeleton.
- Save the animated character model as an .fbx file.