MoBu command line?

Tools MotionBuilder
#1

Being a Maya scripter/rigger I know very little about MoBu at all, but I got a question from our tools team if it was possible to plot the animations in an fbx file and export the results without having to sit in MoBu and wait for it to complete.

The reason they are looking into it is so that the animators don’t have to wait for the plotting of the key on the skeleton each time they export. Instead we want the exporter to save out a temp fbx file and a settings file and then the exporter should finish the export in another process while they can continue working in MoBu.

As a Maya user, the first thing that came to mind was of course to run a second application in command line. Does MoBu have any command line access or some other wait to perform something like that without having to open up another MoBu process with interface and all that?

Or is there any other tool out there that can do this already?

#2

As far as I know, Motionbuilder doesn’t have a command line mode, but it does have telnet access. Chris Evans explains a bit about it here:

http://chrisevans3d.com/tutorials/mbui.htm

He uses to create an interactive tool, but the principle would be the same I guess. The problem is that you would still need to have all of the program open and running on the machine though. Other than that, plotting and exporting is quite an easy process with python.

#3

Can you set up a zombie box that you can send files and commands via a command port to mobu (installed on that machine)? That way you can at least offload the process from the artists machine? Jason Parks did something similar to this for us at SCEA some time ago, can you comment on this Jason?

#4

That would end up with a file queue, and I think we’d like to stay away from that. I’ve been at other companies with that kind of systems for light baking and such and it usually ends up being a bottleneck in the pipeline.

#5

I was going to mentioned FBX SDK, but I did a quick search and it seems that the FBX SDK cant evaluate character animation without plotting it to the bone.

Perhaps with effort and time you could write your own plotter to the FBX SDK, because the SDK itself is very good at retrieving and handling data inside of FBX-files

#6

I think we had Temerity launch Mobu on the server box passing in the batch script we wanted to run with arguments which were the file(s) to process. I think Temerity handled the file queue for and knew which machines were still busy, so there was no problem there. Even worse case scenario, the server could handle multiple spawns of the MoBu app (if you don’t run out of memory).

MoBu will probably never have command line only as the app was not written for that in mind and it would be virtually impossible to add that functionality (according to Autodesk support).