Setting up Pycharm for use with MotionBuilder

Coding
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1

Hello,
In the 2020 version of MotionBuilder, there’s a python interpreter MoBuPy.exe that you can run standalone and I really wanna use it in PyCharm. The same thing you can do with mayapy.exe and it works great!

When I try and setup mobupy.exe I get an error “Invalid Python Interpreter”.

Also I heard,
If you make a symbolic link called python.exe and points it to mobupy.exe it works with pycharm

example: mklink python.exe mobupy.exe

How do you do this mklink, in Pycharm? and where?

Any help would be great.

2

mklink is a Windows command - mklink | Microsoft Learn

So you can use that command to make a symlink using cmd.exe. Once you do this, Windows will show a new python.exe alongside mobypy.exe.

You can then use this in PyCharm.

3

Idunham1 many thanks for your help! :slightly_smiling_face:

4

I suspect this goes deeper than just needing a symlink. the motion builder python interpreter may not act the same way as the vanilla python executable.

what does mobupy.exe --help output?

sometimes these vendors in their infinite wisdom decide to change some sort of core behavior and it breaks everything :frowning:

5

Hey! Sorry to revive an old thread, but were you ever able to set up Pycharm with Mobu? I’ve been trying with the 3.7 interpreter + symlink method and it’s not working :frowning:

6

Hey! sorry to double-necro a thread which is now even older, but it seems setting up MoBu with PyCharm is still a nightmare I cannot wake from :frowning:

I have set PyCharm up for both Maya and UE5 by using mayapy.exe and unreals internal python.exe as the respecive interpreters in both cases no problem, but when I try to set it up in a similar way for MoBu 2022 or 2023, I get a ton of issues.

First issue is the same as OP, the name is invalid. This was easy to fix by simply copy/renaming it, or creating a symlink as suggested. However, there are still further issues.
First, and most worryingly is that whenever I launch PyCharm using this MoBu project/interpreter, Pycharm continually spawns a background process (Autodesk MotionBuilder/Console Window Host) every second or so that steals focus and then immediately closes, making the PyCharm editor basically unusable, as as soon as I try to access a menu or right-click, I lose focus and they disappear.
Second, the pyfbsdk module (which appears to be a .pyd file) is not recognized by PyCharm in the editor, so I get errors everywhere and no auto-completion. However, if I open the Python Console in Pycharm and do import pyfbsdk it works fine :confused:

I’ve been googling for over a day about this, but found little to no solutions or help. The only online guide I found (PyCharm autocomplete setup for MotionBuilder scripting | Swapnil Revankar) is old and for MoBu2020, which was probably Python2 and doesn’t seem to exhibit any of the issues above seen in 2022 or 2023.
It seems the amount of online users using MoBu is small, so the venn diagram of those also using PyCharm is even smaller. If anyone has any info at all that would help it’d be very much appreciated. I need to start coding in MoBu and PyCharm is my IDE of choice, but it’s literally unusable in this state…