plotting in motionBuilder
 

weird thing happening.

facts:

because the mocapHips differ so much from myRigHips in size (my hips are about twice as long on x-axis than the mocap hips, which were calibrated wrong during recording in my opinion), I used to bake the mocap anim to my rig in maya with a special setup where all joints above the hip just pass rotation values and below the hips it is all ik and point constraints.

now I wanted to do everything in MB. which looks nice too - until I plot the animation from mocap to my rig. instantly after plotting process my costum rig hips shrink to the size of the mocap hips. now my massive worker Character looks like a little boy with a stick in the ass.

I´ve allready tried to debug and used different settings on the solving and retargeting tab, but none of it helps. I am pretty sure this shrinking of joints/effectors isn´t supposed to happen.


pic:
yellow = mocap
white = myRig

nevermind. must be some sort of bug.
rebuilt the scene from scratch. no error. can´t even recreate it.

one pipeline which i usually follow is plotting the motion capture data to a character (skeleton) in motion builder exporting the skeleton to maya then binding in maya which has a better paint weight system. Just make sure you export the master node for the skeleton so you can scale it properly. With a skeleton in maya you can just scale the hips .

I wouldent do it that way, I would make, bind and paint weights in maya, then go to MB to add the data from one skeleton to another, that way you can plot the data to the character and adjust it to stop any interpenitrations in motion builder (using its realtime animation) which is a faster approach than adjusting the animation in maya.

I am happy to tell that after about a month now I kind of getting it now with MB.

what I can advice to any noobie like me is paying attention on how to use the layer and switching between IK and FK. it turned out that I have to best and most predictable results when plotting VERY often. now I usually key on 1 layer above the base at the most. as son as I am happy with what I can get with this one layer I plot the keys immediately onto the skeleton as a kind of backup and go back to the empty layer. this prevents the rig from goin crazy when I have to key IK and FK on more than 1 layer. I can´t exactly tell - it´s still all intuitive by now, but I had some issues when keying different layers, switching between IK and FK. every time I dragged the from IK to FK or back the skeleton shifted in movement. so after some while it becomes (at least to me) way too complicated keying in the right mode and not getting lost in making corrections to my own added on-top-animation.

whatsoever - MB turned out to be real fast compared to Maya with animation stuff - now look at me, who would have guessed that..? I just had to get my brain cleaned from maya workflow and wrap it around MB.

thx to all of your helps!