Kaydara MotionBuilder 5: new upgrade offers power, low price.(Animation)

Kaydara, a pioneer in animation and motion capture, always has offered very high-end and fairly pricey software. MotionBuilder 5 is priced at $995, making quality motion editing available to a much wider audience.

Strictly an animation authoring system, MotionBuilder does not provide any modeling tools. Basic texturing and effects can be done in the software, but high-end rendering is perhaps best left to other programs. Characters are modeled in a favorite 3D package and brought into MotionBuilder where motion--whether keyframed animation, motion clips, motion capture, or automatic animation--is applied.

Getting data to and from other applications is fairly easy, thanks to Kaydara's .FBX file format. Rapidly becoming a standard file format for 3D authoring, it supports NURBS and polygonal models, as well as texturing, deformations, and skeletons. I passed scenes between Alias Systems' Maya, Discreet's 3ds max, and MotionBuilder with relative ease. The .FBX format also is available as a plug-in for QuickTime, for viewing motion files on any system. It is a great feature for directors who need to see animation files but don't have sophisticated 3D software.

The interface seems a little daunting at first, but after a few minutes of exploration, things become fairly clear. The software relies on floating windows to organize the work flow. MotionBuilder has windows for asset management, motion editing, transformations, and so on. One nice little feature enabled me to switch the software's hot keys to reflect my favorite package.

Before animation begins, characters and assets are imported into the scene in the .FBX format. The software supports most major features, so models are imported fully rigged and textured. Users performing character animation might elect to use MotionBuilder's rigging tools. MotionBuilder's skeletons have many nice features. They are fairly smart in that motion from one type of character can be mapped smoothly onto others; a karate kick for a tall character will map directly to a short one. The skeletons can move seamlessly between forward and inverse kinematics. MotionBuilder skeletons also have controls that can define the floor plane and a character's finger tips, thereby helping to prevent the feet from going through the floor or a character's hand from penetrating an object it is holding.

After a character is rigged, it can be brought to life using a variety of methods. MotionBuilder provides a curve editor and ...