Polhemus Plug-in for Motionbuilder
Autodesk MotionBuilder is a powerful character animation and motion editing tool. Use the Polhemus Liberty or Patriot to stream data from a live actor into MotionBuilder. This video tutorial will teach you how to map the tracking data being streamed by your Polhemus device onto a MotionBuilder actor, and then animate the actor. Also included is a video showing a user with Polhemus Liberty sensors animating a character in Vizard.
Key steps covered in this tutorial are:
- Adding the Polhemus device in Motionbuilder to bring in tracking data.
- Adding a standing or seated actor to the scene. The following link will provide you with a fbx file of a seated actor.
- Translating the Polhemus root to match any offset of the Polhemus Transmitter from the ground.
- Recording the user T-pose.
- Scaling, translating, and rotating the actor to match the Polhemus markers.
- Adding a fake hip marker. This is necessary if you are not going to have a sensor on the hip.
- Creating a marker set to link the markers to the actor's body parts.
- Real-time animating the actor
Related to this tutorial are:
Polhemus to Live Characters demo:
The following video shows a user with Polhemus Liberty sensors animating a character in Vizard. There are four sensors being used, one for each hand, one on the chest, and one on the head. The transmitter is placed directly below the user, centered and in line with the back. View the MotionBuilder Live Characters(Vizard) tutorial to retarget your animated Motionbuilder actor to a character and stream this data into Vizard to achieve the final result that you see here.