MotionBuilder is a 3D character animation 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 headquartered ...

. 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 ...

motion capture Motion capture (sometimes referred as mo-cap or mocap, for short) is the process of recording the movement of objects or people. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robo ...

, and traditional

keyframe animation In animation and filmmaking, a key frame (or keyframe) is a drawing or shot that defines the starting and ending points of a smooth transition. These are called ''frames'' because their position in time is measured in frames on a strip of film ...

. 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 tradi ...

projects. At

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

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 ...

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 hierar ...

* Support for

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 and C++ via Qt and

PySide PySide is a Python (programming language), Python Language binding, binding of the cross-platform Graphical user interface, GUI toolkit Qt (framework), Qt developed by The Qt Company, as part of the Qt for Python project. It is one of the List of w ...

. * Ragdoll physics *

Inverse kinematics In computer animation and robotics, inverse kinematics is the mathematical process of calculating the variable joint parameters needed to place the end of a kinematic chain, such as a robot manipulator or animation character's skeleton, in a gi ...

* 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 ...

* Direct connection to other Autodesk digital content creation tools * The

FBX FBX (''Filmbox'') is a proprietary file format () developed by Kaydara and owned by Autodesk since 2006. It is used to provide interoperability between digital content creation applications. FBX is also part of Autodesk Gameware, a series of vid ...

(.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

References

3D graphics software Autodesk products Proprietary software that uses Qt Proprietary commercial software for Linux {{graphics-software-stub

Features

See also

References