MotionBuilder is a 3D
character animation
Character animation is a specialized area of the animation process, which involves bringing animated s to life. The role of a character animator is analogous to that of a film or stage actor and character animators are often said to be "actors wit ...
software produced by
Autodesk
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartere ...
. It is used for
virtual cinematography
Virtual cinematography is the set of cinematographic techniques performed in a computer graphics environment. It includes a wide variety of subjects like photographing real objects, often with stereo or multi-camera setup, for the purpose of rec ...
,
motion capture, and traditional
keyframe animation. It was originally named Filmbox when it was first created by Canadian company Kaydara, later acquired by Alias and renamed to MotionBuilder. Alias in turn was acquired by Autodesk.
It is primarily used in film, games, television production, as well as other
multimedia
Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...
projects.
At
SIGGRAPH 2012, Autodesk announced a partnership with
Weta Digital and
Lightstorm Entertainment
Lightstorm Entertainment is an American independent production company founded in 1990 by filmmaker James Cameron and producer Lawrence Kasanoff. The majority of its films have been distributed and owned by 20th Century Studios. Its productions i ...
to develop the next generation of the technology.
Features
* Facial and
skeletal animation
Skeletal animation or rigging is a technique in computer animation in which a character (or other articulated object) is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called the ''mesh'' or ''skin'') and a hierarc ...
* Support for
motion capture devices
* A
software development kit
A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific ...
that exposes functionality through
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
and
C++
C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...
via
Qt and
PySide
PySide is a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt developed by The Qt Company, as part of the Qt for Python project. It is one of the alternatives to the standard library package Tkinter. Like Qt, PySide is free software. PySide ...
.
*
Ragdoll physics
Ragdoll physics is a type of procedural animation used by physics engines, which is often used as a replacement for traditional static death animations in video games and animated films. As computers increased in power, it became possible to d ...
*
Inverse kinematics
* 3D
non-linear editing system
Non-linear editing is a form of offline editing for audio, video, and image editing. In offline editing, the original content is not modified in the course of editing. In non-linear editing, edits are specified and modified by specialized sof ...
* Direct connection to other Autodesk
digital content creation tools
* The
FBX (.fbx) file format
for
3D software
3D computer graphics, or “3D graphics,” sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for th ...
interoperability has grown out of this package
See also
*
Autodesk Maya
Autodesk Maya, commonly shortened to just Maya ( ), is a 3D computer graphics application that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, originally developed by Alias and currently owned and developed by Autodesk. It is used to create assets for interact ...
*
Autodesk 3ds Max
Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio and 3D Studio Max, is a professional 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images. It is developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capab ...
*
Blender (software)
References
3D graphics software
Autodesk products
Proprietary software that uses Qt
Proprietary commercial software for Linux
{{graphics-software-stub