Bellsey wrote:When it comes to anything mocap related, I would choose Motionbuilder all the time. Yes, Soft does have MOTOR, and it's ok, but Mobu is way better and certainly more reliable. Of course as someone for Autodesk, I'm bound to say that, but I'm also basing that many years of working with mocap.
Without wising to throw a grenade into the middle of an argument, Mathaeus is right about often not having to do much with mocap data, as it's been prepared by someone else. If you use a mocap studio, more often than not, they will do the hard work of solving and the actual cleaning up of the data. So when they send you data, you shouldn't have to do much with it, in that respect. Then of course you have all the post anim work and getting the final result you need.
I would agree that in the past Maya, wasn't good at working with mocap data in the same way as Biped, Mobu, or MOTOR, because it didn't have a similar full body rigging system. But if you knew you rigging chops, you could easily build a rig so that you could import mocap onto it.
Now it's alot simple because the HIK (HumanIK) solver system as been added to Maya and MayaLT, and you can now create a rig, and retarget animations in the same that you can in Mobu. The UI has been conformed so that it's similar (if not identical) between those packages too.
For actual live mocap work, shooting and onset, etc, etc, I would still go with Mobu, but then after all the solving work, you could easily go to Maya or Max if thats your flavour.
Well, i can agree with you up to a point. Motion Builder is a no go for me because of budget issues, and plus i like to keep all of my eggs in one basket(XSI in this case). With other words i can only work with and deploy a single major application, considering costs involved. First, i am preparing my own data, as i have my own optical system. Second, Maya does not have anything even close to MOTOR. If, and it's a big if, you paid some studio to do your MOCAP and they come up with an already clean data, then yea, you can use Maya. But even then the tools are just not on par with MOTOR, you can't adjust your data based on each joint before commit to changes(i'm talking about offset some channels basically; this is done in MOTOR before applying your MOCAP to rig). In my particular situation Maya is of no use, and way bellow XSI - speaking of witch. Why don't autodesk takes all the best XSI has to offer and port it to Maya? I am talking about ease of use, interface(up to a point ok), GATOR, MOTOR etc? Or at least keep selling the XSI licenses? It's so hard to keep selling an application even without support? We all took time and effort to learn an application just to discover that we need to re-invest all that to a new one. This is the most frustrating and infuriating thing, that i can not license the application i invested so much into it. I am forced to change, because i can't invest in a dead application. Will not go to that rant again, but i will try to change the company this time to avoid this type of things in the future.
