honestly I don´t quite know yet which task I want to do in which software. until now I was switching between maya and motionBuilder whereas the main task would have been to get MB that well known so I could just import mocap data and work my way straight to the end there. now here comes the big

BUT,

I started hating MB pretty soon because (maybe I am just lazy, but I don´t think so) documentation is just annoying for MB. when I was learning rigging 2 years ago or something here - I had a long thread - there was allways this issue for me: if I dont understand the basics or you know, how is this Character build from scratch, I am the person, due to my very visual comprehension, who has a real hard time understanding things. funny enough MB´s docs explain things like - click this button and that happens. well Sir, I have eyes in my head and see myself what happens when I click something, I don´t need you stupid documentation repeat yourself without telling me how it is actually working. this was why I am banging my head agains wall since some 3 weeks now. you see, I have a lot of frustration in me. XD


finally I went back to maya yesterday and discovered the FBIK. also told the other guy about that in his thread.

https://forum.simplymaya.com/showthre...threadid=30524

well that changed things slightly but I can imagine that I will go back to MB at some point in time as soon as I have a good understanding of what is this Character setup all about, how is it built, how are the 3 skeletons connected, why does it need so many charactersets to group these big amount of channels in order to make the whole FK/IK thing work how it should. and maya provides me with a multiple amount of information on this issue compared to motionbuilder. the sad thing right now is - I don´t see a reason why I should ever turn back to MB since I have (allmost) everything important here in maya.


to answer your question -

my task would be this. we´ve recorded about 60 animations with duration between about 900 and 3000 frames per take. these animations cover the different poses for a worker who paints the wall, standing on the ground or on a hydraulic crane. he walks through big door with opening closing anims, walkAnims, paintAnims, relaxingAnims and so on. I take these raw files, have to clean them up and then create cycled animations which are finally taken into a realtime render and triggered by time events. we will have a 2nd recording for more anims not to far from now, but I am still figuring out how to create the fastest workflow with the best quality results.

since the mocap company calibrated the hips incorrect when we were recording, I couldn´t get around the problem that the legs/feet of my Character were floating. I spent about a week with the docs, tutorials and forums, but not even 1 person or ressource could point me to a working solution so I took a day with maya recording some actions in a script, which feeds the mocapSkel into my rigg exept the legs which get pointConstrained with an offsett for the kneeEffectors. this was when I saw again that within a mousclick I can save time in maya compared to an annoying procedure in motionBuilder.

well I think this should give you a picture of my situation.

I really´d like to use motionBuilder, but I somehow miss good ressources to get into it...