Hey All, As you may have noticed, we’ve changed ownership of the MotionBuilder blog. I’ve had the opportunity over the last several years to meet many of you. But for those whom I haven’t had the chance to meet, let me introduce myself. My name is Kevin O’Neal, I’m the Product Designer on MotionBuilder here at Autodesk. I’ve been working with the product now for 8+ years, starting back when it was still called Filmbox, I think 2.7 was the first one I looked at. (At this point… it’s a little foggy.) For the past 4 years, I’ve been here at Autodesk and for the last roughly 2 years working as the designer.

As to Curtis, After 8+ years of working on MotionBuilder in about every role (except developer ;-) ) Curtis has decided to take on a new challenge in his life, changing companies to work on bringing some new products to market. Please join me in thanking Curtis for all his work and dedication to the product over the years. (Hopefully he’s still reading the blog to find out what we’re up to.) He’s definitely been a huge force in the work we’ve done over the years. Our team wishes him all the best in his new role!

Coming up for MotionBuilder is GDC. We’re all looking forward to the show this year. I’ll be heading out there for the week to check out all the new stuff, and maybe if I have enough free time to catch a class or two. (Unfortunately, not looking promising.) I'm pretty excited to get back out to San Fran though, and catch up on what all the MotionBuilder users are doing. Definitely stop by the ADSK booth if you make it out there this year!

I’ll try and include interesting tips or ideas whenever possible when I post. I do read the forums fairly regularly, so I’ll try and also pull general topics from different forum posts that I see. (Probably won’t be as cool as some of Duncan’s, but I’ll do my best. :-) )

For this round, I’ve included a script as an attachment. This is something one of our talented programmers cooked up for Python. At times, when you call something incorrectly in Python you can crash out. We try and catch these crashes wherever possible, but sometimes it’s still a possibility. If you’re working on 5 lines… this is pretty easy to track down. If you’re working on 200 lines, and importing other modules, etc this can turn into a bit of a bear to figure out what went wrong. Sebastien cooked up this “Debugger” tool that allows you to execute the script and it will print a log file. This way you can see the last line executed if a crash is occurring. Hopefully this will save you a bit of time. Do note that this is just some test code, it’s not production ready. But if it gives you some good ideas, then I’m glad it helps!

That's all for now, more to come in the next post...

Looking forward to hearing from you!
Cheers,
Kevin