I have been considering a move away from Autodesk. I have been looking at Houdini to replace Maya. So far, Houdini is looking pretty awesome. However, I still need a replacement for MotionBuilder, as it relates to editing/cleaning motion capture data. What alternatives would you recommend?

Moin,

> What alternatives would you recommend?

… honestly, in my eyes there still is none. I have done some market research two years ago, considering an investment in a project that was just about that: An alternative to MB without ties to AD. The market back then seemed way too small in potential sales numbers to justify more than a hobby project and my bet would be that this situation is only slowly changing with all those cheap and over-cheap motion-capture-systems getting pumped out.

Marc

malbrecht
… honestly, in my eyes there still is none.

Unfortunately, I think you may be right.

I am a current maintenance customer of Autodesk's Entertainment and Creation Suite Ultimate, which comes with Maya, 3ds Max, Mudbox and MotionBuilder. I pay approximately $1,000 per year in maintenance costs. Although Autodesk is now forcing maintenance customers to move to subscriptions, I don't expect my all-in costs to increase significantly as they will be somewhat grandfathered for the next 3+ years. Nevertheless, I was very bothered by Autodesk's treatment of its existing, long-standing customers and wanted to move away from Autodesk as a penalty of sorts.

What I am discovering, however, is that there really isn't a viable alternative to Autodesk's Entertainment and Creation Suite Ultimate at anywhere near $1,000 per year. I had high hopes that Houdini, ZBrush and maybe one more product (e.g., Modo), would be a viable replacement candidate. Unfortunately, that has not worked out. There are just too many gaps. I hope this will change in the near future. Until that happens, I may have to bow my head in contrition to Autodesk and beg its forgiveness for my open criticisms of its behavior

That being said, I am still holding out hope that I will find that magic combination of software that will enable me to cut the cord with Autodesk.

Recently, I heard about Ikinema WebAnimate for mocap cleaning and retargeting. Does anyone have experience with that?

It's so strange: such a heavily used and mature technology with only so few software contenders.

I am a heavy user of motionbuilder but stuck with the feeling the program is slowly dying under my fingers. The AD-updates are laughable. There is nothing serious happening in development there anymore. Feels they want to migrate it's functionality to Maya but once one tries to edit mocap there it goes down the hill fast.

I will have a look again at web-animate (again) and report my findings.

It should be possible though to bend houdini's powers to this subject. In my view there are some wrong concepts/methods in how mocap is being processed and I would gladly elaborate about this. Building it from scratch up within a program which just loves points would be an interesting and hopefull rewarding challenge