MotionBuilder Exporter

Note: Unlike the 3ds Max, Maya, and XSI plugins, the MotionBuilder plugin does not support scripting, and it does not support morph targets.

Main Panel

This panel lets you create, load and save actor (*.facefx) files. You can also change the analysis actor that is used when generating animations or doing a new take from the animation panel.

Ref Pose Panel

The Reference Pose Panel is used to import and export the reference pose from the current frame. You should include all bones that you want FaceFX to control.

After export, the bones contained in the reference pose are listed, and you are now able to create bone poses from the Bone Pose Panel. If you change your reference pose at any point, you should also re-export all of your bone poses because different bones may be pruned out of the poses now that the reference pose is different.

Bone Pose Panel

Simply go to the frame you want to export or import a bone pose and click on the appropriate button. The Batch Import and Batch Export buttons will ask for a text file. See the .FaceFX Exporter page for a description of the expected format.

Bone poses are stored based upon how they differ from the reference pose. For this reason, if you change your reference pose, you have to re-export all of your bone poses.  The log file contains information on how many bones are "pruned" from the reference pose because they are identical to the reference pose transforms.

Anim Panel

The Animations section is the interface for creating, importing, renaming and deleting animations.

Import - Imports the selected animation to the timeline.  See the .FaceFX Exporter page for more information.

Clean - Cleans the timerange of all keys for all bones in the reference pose. 

Delete - Deletes the currently selected animation.

Rename - Renames the currently selected animation.

Generate Anim - Generates a new animation from an audio file. See the Plugin Analysis page for more information.

Logging information

The FaceFX plug-in outputs debug information to the FaceFX_Log_MotionBuidler.txt file.  Check the log file to view details on the number of bones pruned out of each pose and other troubleshooting information.  This file is located in the following folder:


My Documents\FaceFX Plugins\FaceFX 2010