Behind-the-Scenes with Firstborn  
Get an exclusive sneak peek inside innovative digital agency Firstborn.
  • 1/3
You are here: Homepage /  Products / Autodesk MotionBuilder 2011
Autodesk MotionBuilder 2012

Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 2012 software delivers new tools for virtual movie-making, performance animation, and stereoscopic productions, and enhanced interoperability with other products in the Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012.

 

Detailed MotionBuilder Features

Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 2011 software delivers features that enable it to integrate more smoothly and reliably into production pipelines. With extended animation layers that closely match those in Autodesk® Maya® 2011 software, a more consistent method for handling materials, and native support for version of Autodesk® FBX® 2011 asset exchange technology, artists will find it easier to use MotionBuilder 2011 alongside certain other products. In addition, skinning and blendshape deformations now calculated on the GPU, the in-viewport experience is significantly more interactive, and playback many times faster, while the Story Tool offers greater stability and performance.

 

GPU-Calculated Skin and Blendshape Deformers

Using the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) to help calculate skinning and blendshape deformations yields significantly faster performance, providing a more interactive in-viewport experience and much faster playback.

Animation Layers UpdatesClick the image to enlarge

Animation Layers Updates

An expanded animation layer toolset offers new capabilities to rename, mute, solo, and merge layers, and blend them with variable weighting. In addition to providing more control and greater flexibility in MotionBuilder, the toolset now more closely matches the behavior of that in Maya, helping improve interoperability.

New Material Handling MethodClick the image to enlarge

New Material Handling Method

A new method for handling materials that is aligned with the FBX material model provides better consistency with content creation applications and games engines, increasing ease-of-use and helping improve interoperability.

Integrated Nvidia PhysX Plug-inClick the image to enlarge

Integrated Nvidia PhysX Plug-in

Rigid-body and ragdoll simulations can now be calculated using the Nvidia® PhysX® plug-in, a feature of particular benefit to games customers using the PhysX middleware.

Python Batch Tool

The batch tool helps eliminate repetitive tasks by enabling a set of processes to be automatically applied to multiple files, has been rewritten in Python programming language, enabling it to be more readily customized or extended.

Native FBX 2011 Support

MotionBuilder now supports the most recent version of Autodesk® FBX® asset exchange technology, helping improve interoperability and provide support for more features.

Story Tool Re-architecture

Artists working on pre-visualization, or laying out storyboards or multiple cameras, will appreciate improvements to the stability and performance of the Story Tool as a result of under-the-hood work to make it part of the core MotionBuilder engine.

Motion Capture on Bones

Enhancements to the MotionBuilder Open Reality® SDK enable developers to bypass the Actor solve to directly access data on the character’s bones.

Enhanced SDK Documentation

Consolidated documentation and new examples help new users to become familiar with the MotionBuilder SDK.

Perforce Support

A new plug-in provides support for users of Perforce asset management systems.