MotionBuilder's rag doll solver allows characters to become digital stunt doubles, falling and tumbling with a high degree of realism. Courtesy of Autodesk.

Another way of creating motion is in realtime. Using its Live Device support feature, MotionBuilder connects to a wide variety of input devices, including MIDI controllers, joysticks, sound devices, tablets and more. These can be used either to create motion or to trigger existing motion clips. Animation triggering using external devices can be a very quick way to "puppeteer" digital characters in realtime. This is a very unique feature and ripe for creative possibilities.

New to MotionBuilder 2009 are some nice dynamics tools. Rigid body simulation allows for realtime collisions between objects. This can be very useful for visual effects, but also to those who need their characters to interact with the real world. In a similar vein, MotionBuilder's rag doll solver allows characters to become digital stunt doubles, falling and tumbling with a high degree of realism.

One thing about the software is that it's completely realtime. There's no renderer to speak of, all the rendering happens on the graphics card. This means a fast high quality graphics card is a must. I used an NVIDIA Quadro 3700 on a quad core system and it worked great. MotionBuilder can do a number of really nice rendering tricks, including normal mapping, used for highly realistic displacement maps. These can make a simple mesh look very complex. For those doing game authoring, MotionBuilder supports CgFX hardware shaders, so what's seen in the viewport will be very close to what shows up in the game.

Once the animation is complete, the characters and motion can be exported using the FBX format to a 3D package for final rendering and output. While the FBX format is very robust and can support most tasks, it might be nice for MotionBuilder to create even tighter integration with other Autodesk products by supporting direct output to Maya and Max formats.

For those who work with motion on a day to day basis, MotionBuilder is a terrific package and can save a production a lot of time. It is, however, strictly a motion editor. The one thing I've noticed is that a lot of MotionBuilder's core features are showing up in other Autodesk products.

Maya, for example, now has an Animation Layers feature similar to MotionBuilder's, and it also has Full Body IK. With such advanced features showing up in other packages, the need for separate motion editing software becomes less essential. MotionBuilder is really aimed at those places that create a lot of motion, such as motion capture studios, game development houses and film studios.

George Maestri is an animation director and producer. He is currently the president of Rubber Bug, a Los Angeles-based animation studio. He also teaches animation at Otis College of Art and Lynda.com.