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Welcome back to our tour of the MotionBuilder interface!
In the previous video, we opened an FBX scene,
set some preferences,
checked out the viewer,
merged in a character from our project folder in the asset browser,
and played back its animation with the transport controls.
In this video, we'll manipulate our character's control rig,
set some keys,
create an animation layer,
check out what's in the Navigator,
and create a custom layout.
The Character Controls window plays an important role when it comes to
setting up and animating characters in MotionBuilder.
The Controls tab displays a figure representation of your character's control rig,
letting your easily select the effectors.
Effectors are control objects that let you pose and animate your character when you translate them,
or rotate them.
The Keying modes on top let you decide whether an effector moves only that body part and its branch,
or the entire body.
If your character doesn't have a control rig yet, this body will be blank …
Which means that you need to use the figure on the Definition tab to define, or characterize, your character.
Characterization is a tagging process that all characters need to go through
for MotionBuilder to understand their skeletal structure.
Once that's been done, as with Natasha here, you can create a control rig.
We'll go into this process in more detail in other videos,
since this is a core concept to understand for using MotionBuilder.
To create keyframe animation on your character, or any object in the scene,
you can use the options in the Key Controls window.
These controls let you create keys that record an object's property,
such as its translation or rotation, at the current frame set in the timeline.
You can also remove keys at that frame.
The Animation Layers editor lets you use adjust an animation
without changing or duplicating the original animation that's in the BaseAnimation layer.
For example, you can create a layer on top of the original animation,
and adjust the animation there without touching the original animation.
To the left of these windows is the Navigator.
This is a commonly used tool that lists all the assets in your scene and organizes them by type,
such as Cameras, Characters, Lights, Materials, and so on.
To edit an asset's properties, double-click it to show them in the area on the right,
then change them as you like.
The four other tabs in the Navigator window help you edit and control your animation.
The Dopesheet displays the keyframes on tracks for animated objects in your scene,
making it easy to edit multiple keys at once.
The FCurves, or function curves, editor also shows the keyframes for the animated objects in your scene,
but instead of being on tracks, it represents animation as a graph,
showing how values change over time.
This makes it easier to adjust individual key values
and the interpolating curve between them.
The Story tool is a great help for visualizing your animated scene using multiple cameras.
Or use it to create and edit the animation for your characters.
For example, you could create animation clips and cycle them,
or blend them.
The Animation Trigger tool, as its name implies,
lets you set up triggering mechanisms to execute one or more animation clips.
For example, you could set up a trigger to drive a character's motion
using keyboard keys, other clips, or even a game controller.
Now that you've seen all the different windows in the interface, we'll change their arrangement,
which is known as the layout.
The default Editing layout is a general purpose layout that is well-suited for creating and playing back animation.
You could also use the Preview layout to have a large viewer,
or the Scripting layout to display the Python Editor on the side.
These preset layouts support multiple screen resolutions
and will optimize the interface to fit within your current one.
To create your own layout, choose Create Custom from the Layout menu, and give it a name.
It's added to the list in the Layout menu and set as your current layout.
Now you can undock the windows and move them around, resize them, or close them, in order to arrange the interface as you like.
You could also move all other windows to a second monitor so that the viewer has the maximum amount of real estate.
Any window that you removed can be brought back into the layout from the Window menu.
When you make changes to the interface,
MotionBuilder automatically updates the current layout if you have Auto-update Layout on.
If you want to update it yourself, you can turn this option off
and use the Update Current Layout command instead.
The next time you launch MotionBuilder, it will reload the last layout that you selected.
So that was a tour of the MotionBuilder interface.
In the following videos, we'll stop and take a closer look at each of the parts of the interface.