Hand Tool
The tool for procedural finger animation in Mobu.
The plugin works only with FK elements of Control Rig. A character must be chosen as a current one in CharacterControls window and have assigned control rig input Ctrl Rig In.
Control system of fingers has two modes: active and passive.
In passive mode there isn’t tick Control and there is a red indicator on the right. This mode allows to choose elements of FK character.
Selection, in this case, can be done by clicking LMB on the appropriate indicator of a phalanx in the picture of a hand.
Keyboard combination when selection are:
CTRL – add / remove selection to (from) the current selection SHIFT – select finger elements and add them to selection.
The mode is active when there is check mark Connect. If the connection with the character is successful, the check mark is set.
! Before connection you should set the direction of a local axis of a thumb pointing upwards. This can be done in the tab Setup.
When connection is ready, the properties of a parametric animation come into effect.
Rotation – spreads to the phalanxes in compliance with weight value and inherit. Spread – rotation of upper phalanx of a finger round the axis Y. Damping – finger motion damping. Weight - Intermediate values are interpolated.
Inherit – shows what weight of rotation each finger phalanx receives.
The value can eigher increase rotation (more then 100), decrease rotation (close to zero) or inverse rotation with negative values.
All the values above are avaliable for animating.
< – go to the previous key. key – set a key for selected finger (s) > – go to the next key
x – remove the key
A – when entering absolute value of parameters are being used, otherwise relative values (addition to the current one) are being used.
All the parameters of finger animation are entered in user properties of first phalanxes of every finger.
You can handle trajectory and animate fingers with the help of FCurve.
Finger animation can be done by several passes, increasing elaboration every time.
To bake derived motion, you should press the button Apply in the right upper corner in the window Hand Tool at every stage.
The window Hand Tool can be set as a tab in Character Controls window. You should save layout of MoBu windows under some name, for example My_Layout. Exit the program and open My_Layout.txt in a text editor.
User files of configuration are in local storage of a current user of the system, for example: c:\Users\Neill\AppData\Local\Autodesk\MB2010\config\Layouts\
This is an example of a fragment of window settings Character Controls
[Wnd_4] CurrentTab = 1 Maximized = false NbTools = 3 Options_3 = Layout:Tree Listing:Icons HorizontalSplitter:240 VerticalSplitter:120 SpreadSplitter:200 TabPos = top ToolH = 451 ToolName_1 = ControlSet ToolName_2 = Hand Controls ToolName_3 = Asset Browser ToolW = 241 ToolX = 1038 ToolY = 4 UsePix = true WindowName = Character Controls
There is one more NbTools in it and ToolName_2 = Hand Controls is added, which makes it possible to encrease a number of tabs by 1 and put the window of finger control as the second tab out of 3.
I hope this tool will be useful.
- 07.05.2013 – Compiled for the Autodesk MotionBuilder 2014 (64 bits)
- 17.03.2013 – Compiled for the Autodesk MotionBuilder 2013 (64 bits)