By Ian Mankowski
January 1, 2004
Kaydara is a name more typically associated with their Filmbox software which has been the motion capture editing program of choice for many studios since the early 90s. But recently, Kaydara has been pushing themselves into new markets with a suddenness and intensity that reflects their excitement and dedication to a new way of doing animation. In the past year, the FBX format has quickly become the format of choice to transmit data between 3D applications, including integration with Quicktime. Motionbuilder is now Kaydara's flagship product, pushing non linear animation and bringing us out of the dark ages.
New Features
Motionbuilder 5 brings a diverse set of new features to the table. We have a nice little turn table feature that allows us to do model turnarounds with a few clicks. To enhance the workflow, you can now right click the camera to choose to select its interest, the camera, or its up-vector.
Motionbuilder 5 now brings real time motion blur to your toolkit. The results are very impressive, and allow for very accurate previewing of the final output.
On the Character side of things, we now have support for quadrapeds, which bring with them a very unique default stance that looks quite comical in nature.
Manipulation pinning has been upgraded so that when an effector is pinned, it resists all translation or rotation. The pull IK effector is now what makes an effector reach towards a location, but still move in space if you affect the rig.
Motionbuilder supports full finger and toe IK rigs with support for up to five fingers and toes and one thumb per hand or foot. These of course can be set up for floor detection, and it's quite impressive. You don't know quite what you've been missing till you've used an IK rigged hand.
It is also now possible to squash and stretch elements of the body using the FK rig, allowing for greater deformation and characterization in your characters.
In the FCurves Window you now can change the FCurves color for easy viewing. More importantly however, is the new tangent weighting which allows you to more precisely control the slope of your animation curves.
Since Kaydara realizes that most people will be utilizing other packages, and Motionbuilder simply for their animation pipeline, they've thoughtfully included keyboard setups to match the default keyboard setups for 3DS Max, Maya, and XSI.
Finally, there's the crown jewel to the new Motionbuilder, which is the Story window. Story is the interface that allows you to do the non linear animation goodness, and resembles popular video editing programs like Premiere or Final Cut in both form and function.
Under the Hood
Kaydara has enough going for it, that oftentimes you can get swept away by the "gee whiz" factor. There's a lot of great rig controls and animation helpers that every single animator has wished he had in his animation package of choice. Remarkably, all of those features are here, in Motionbuilder, and boy does it make animation a heckova lot more fun. Since Motionbuilder is built on a real time engine, you also get realtime feedback of your animation which means that you can see what the heck you're doing without doing pre renders all the time to check if your modifications to the animation look correct.
It's not perfect, there are some flaws, and the real time engine is simply well purposed technology, not magic. Sufficiently high poly models will bring Motionbuilder to its knees just like any other program. However, you can throw a lot more at Motionbuilder before it chokes, and it'll do it with real time lighting allowing you to get a lot more accurate picture on the way shadows and lights play across your animated character.
I was jumping all over myself when I found out that Motionbuilder comes with four different keyboard configurations presets which you can apply, allowing you to use the same configuration you used with Maya, XSI, or Max. Unfortunately this feature is quickly realized to be compensating for something; the unforgivable lack of any ability to customize the controls. Honestly, how many of us actually use the default key setups to any major 3D packages? We may prefer certain workflow paradigms over another, but any 3D animator worth his salt has got his keyboard customized so that if anyone else dares to touch his workstation, it'll drop him to the floor like a bad habit.
What should have been was a customizable key setup, the major packages presets, and an ability to import your custom keyboard settings from the major 3D packages that Motionbuilder supports. Or just the customizable key setup. Come on people!
Unfortunately, the hotkey woes don't stop there though. Motionbuilder is made up of several floating windows and the hotkeys are sensitive to which window is current. Better then having to soley rely on the mouse, but if you have to mouse over to the appropriate window to get the appropriate hotkey functionality, you're already half as efficient as you could be.
Enough about that though, Motionbuilder has enough highlights to to almost make up for that mistake. First on the list is individual IK on every finger and thumb combined with ground plane detection. This is very very sexy and really has to be seen to be believed. Having hands and fingers automatically spread and press against the floor in a realistic manner is a delight you've got to experience to fully appreciate.
Kaydara does a couple unique things with their transform gizmos, some of them good, some not so good. First off, the rotation gizmos alter shades every 45 degrees, which means you can eyeball much more precisely, a very sweet concept which makes you wonder why you haven't seen it across all 3D packages a long time ago. The downside is that the rotation gizmos fade into the background depending on their angle relative to the field of view. As a result, if your viewing a rotation gizmo from the profile, it almost fades out entirely, especially the zed axis which is a rich blue that fades very well into the black void. It's supposed to be a feature, but I find it a terribly non productive one since most of my rotation is done on the gizmo which is in profile to my field of view.
I spoke briefly about IK pull and pin effectors, and they deserve a more in depth explanation.
The Pull IK effector will make your rig try and maintain a desirable orientation in relation to where you pin your limb in space. In comparison, the pin effector does the same, except they forbid the limb from moving no matter how much you pull the rig away from pin point.
An easy example would be to consider a ninja, (William Proton's ninja model is quite popular with the Kaydara crowd, so I've got ninja on the brain as well.) throw the ninja a spear and use the pull IK effector to pin his hands to it. He'll stick with it, unless you pull the spear away, then he'll reach for it desperately.
Now, we've got ninja boy hanging from a roof ledge, he'll do the same thing holding onto the roof edge faithfully, but if you pull his rig away, he'll fall! So apply the pin effector, and you can pull on his legs all day long. Ninja man will use his superior training to hold on till you unpin his hands from the edge.
Your preferred format for transmitting data from Motionbuilder to your 3D program of choice is the Kaydara Filmbox format, or FBX. This format transfers a lot of attributes faithfully, certainly most of the ones neccessary for character animation. Kaydara makes fbx export plugins for Lightwave, Cinema 4D, Maya, 3D Studio Max, Electric Image, and XSI. However, FBX is rapidly making its way to become the new standard, and you can find it as an integrated export option in many new programs, like 3D Studio Max 6.
Kaydara boasts a nifty particle system that is highly customizable and controllable. This is probably where Kaydara's real time working environment makes itself most apparent. In any 3D program, particles are dots or asterix looking objects, and you only get the most general idea of what is happening when you scrub the timeline. Only after several time extensive renders do you get to see the final output.
With Kaydara's realtime engine however, the particle system always emits, and it's doing it very prettily, allowing you to control and tune it to your needs with no perceptual slowdown of your system.
As you can see from the screenshots, Kaydara is an interface based off several working windows which can all be customized in function and placement. Everything is drag and drop, which makes for great workflow. Very Mac-like in that regard, which should thrill the Mac users out there, especially since their options for good character animation programs is limited.
Kaydara MotionBuilder5 ships with two clip art CDs (why they're called clip art I have no idea.) which are full of models, shaders, and motions that you can use to experiment with. In addition, it comes with a Video Training Material Selection on another CD. The content is solid, only marred by the fact that it is a version out of date. Kaydara does have updated VTM tutorials on their website which I recommend to look at before the CD that ships with Motionbuilder 5.
Final Verdict
Kaydara is cool, very cool. From the awesome rigs and rig controls, the real time engine, and intuitive Story window which gives you unprecedented ability to play with and combine animations in a non linear fashion, Kaydara is an animator's toybox. Motionbuilder is easy to recommend, once you try Kaydara's brand of non linear animation, you won't want to go back ever again.
There's a few minor gripes, with their implementation of hotkeys, and implementation of real time shaded rotation gizmos. But certainly no show stopping issues.
If you do character animation, you owe it to yourself to give Motionbuilder a try, the animation production pipeline looks very bright indeed.
Motionbilder 5 for Windows and Macintosh
Kaydara
4428, St-Laurent, Suite 300
Montreal Canada
H2W 1Z5
www.kaydara.com
Requirements - Windows & Macintosh
Windows 2000 SP 2, Windows XP or Mac OSX 10.2
256 MB RAM
300 MB disk space
Graphics card with OpenGL support and 16 MB RAM or more.
Copyright (c) 2004, Ian Mankowski, All Rights Reserved
