MotionBuilder Organization - Sets & Groups

Tools MotionBuilder
#1

I’m trying to get up to speed with MotionBuilder and create a usable workflow within it. So I have a few questions that I was hoping others could shed some light on here.

What is the main suggested usage of Sets & Groups? I have read that you can combine objects of any type within both but only Sets have animation/keying properties.

In 3dsmax I have put everything related to a character in a ‘namespace’ as well as in their own absolute ‘namespace’ prefixed 3dsMax layers, not animation layers. It seems that in MotionBuilder objects can exist in Multiple Groups and Sets, similar to 3dsMax selection sets. Luckily Mobu has built in namespace managing but I need to have a better understanding on what is a good workflow of organizing a scene and the objects within it.

Does anyone have any suggestions here of their own practices? Thanks!

#2

Update: After a bit more digging it appears that Sets are actually exclusive. This is helpful to know.

#3

Hiya Randall
The tweets brought me here :slight_smile: thx for posting this in twitter, I need to visit this site more. Great resources and community here.
Anyway I’d also like to hear how others make use of these features, as i/we plan to utilize them better in our production. Currently I believe we’re only using sets for 3 different types; 1. Mesh 2. Skeleton 3. Rig (namespaced) this just the base rig file without mobcap. With mocap, those skeletons can be put into their own sets as well. Especially if there are more than 1 actor in the take.
Luckily they haven’t really used groups much (probably wouldn’t matter) b/c I’m looking forward to implementing some of their usage for quick selections of different “grouped” body parts or controls (as mentioned by Brad Clark and Chad Moore in the Animators Toolkit for Motionbuilder). Really great info in there and highly recommend checking it out, definitely worth the $40 or so. The cool thing about using groups is the quick access to there selections via hotkey “g” + left click in the viewer. This will select all objects belonging to that group. I can explain further if needed, although I broke my elbow/arm earlier week so I’m some what limited on the computer usage. Luckily vicodin has enabled me to continue rambling on here :slight_smile:

#4

Yeah- Groups are like layers/selection sets and I love the G click select.

Sets- I don’t use them, there are times that Maya can create exclusive sets and Mobu supports that but Groups will be what you want to use.

#5

I don’t use Sets either. Sometimes the animators set them up on a per-scene basis because they want to key some odd combinations together. – which is also the main reason I’ve avoided using Sets in the rig-files.

In older versions of MotionBuilder, before they added “Visibility Inheritance”, they could be used for hiding stuff with constraints because their Visibility can be set to “Animatable”, where Groups does not have that option.

#6

Thanks for the feedback guys. I will dig in some more but this is helpful.

#7

Cool. Please follow up with your findings, notable functions, etc. and what you decided to use and structure your files with them. I’ll be sure to do the same if/when i get to those areas of interest or practical functionality.
Thanks for info about sets and visibility inheritance. Do we have option to turn off visibility inheritance in newer versions? Or, have another way of achieving / implementing this?

#8

[QUOTE=Proteoz;12559]
Thanks for info about sets and visibility inheritance. Do we have option to turn off visibility inheritance in newer versions? Or, have another way of achieving / implementing this?[/QUOTE]

It’s the other way around - older versions had them defaulted to off and no way to change it. Meaning that there was no good way to toggle the visibility of 1000 objects in a constraint without using a set.

In 2012, you can choose it (although it seems like not all types of objects support it), meaning that you can have a top-node (usually a group from Maya or other software) and just control the visibility of that one, which is totally acceptable to put into a constraint – hence no longer the need to use Sets for this functionality.

#9

We use groups more than sets here at our company.

For example:

  • a cutscene of five unique characters
  • every character has his own namespace(hero01, hero02, …) but the same body skeleton(same names, e.g. same biped)
  • we animate the scene
  • for a clean Unreal Engine import a wrote a script that only selects all of the joints of one selected character, deletes his namespace and saves his animation to a separate and clean fbx file, then add the namespace again
  • the exclusive file can be imported into the engine(only bones with animation)

Cheers,

Chris