Overview

Animatica for MotionBuilder is a dockable tool window that brings AI motion generation into your MotionBuilder scene. You describe the motion you want in plain language ("a person walks forward, then waves"), and the tool sends that request to an MMCP (Motion MCP) server — either a local server on your machine or Animatica Cloud — and applies the returned animation to a skeleton in your scene.

Beyond text-to-motion, the tool lets you:

• Pick the model first — every model the server serves is listed in the Model card, and the choice decides which rig the tool builds for you.
• Import existing motion from .npz, .bvh, .glb, or .gltf files in its own Motion Import window.
• Steer the AI with spatial constraints — pin a full-body pose, place hands or feet at exact positions, or draw a path the character should follow.
• Sequence multiple prompts on a visual Prompt Timeline, so a character performs a series of actions back-to-back — and because every skeleton keeps its own set of prompt boxes, you can author separate performances for multiple characters in the same scene.
• Generate a single pose at the current frame.
• Route the result into a new take, an existing take, or a MotionBuilder Story track, and optionally bake it onto an HIK Control Rig for hand editing.

The tool is skeleton-agnostic: it ships with a canonical humanoid layout, but if you point it at your own rig, retargeting happens on the server and the motion comes back on your skeleton.

Concept in one line — Describe motion → the MMCP server generates it → the tool applies it to a skeleton in your scene. Everything else in the window is about which model and skeleton, how the motion is steered, and where the result lands.

#New in 1.1

• Model card — the model is picked first, in card 00, and that choice decides which rig Create Skeleton builds. See Model.
• Compact / Full layout — one switch in the window header hides the rarely-touched controls without resetting them. A hint under Generate names any hidden setting that still changes the result. See Compact & Full layout.
• Settings, Motion Import and Console are dockable windows of their own, opened from the Animatica menu, so the main window is the workflow only.
• Path waypoints land under the hips of the frame you add them on, and the movement line bends through its waypoints instead of connecting them with straight segments. See Constraints.
• Hand/foot pins no longer drag the character off its path. This is a server-side fix — the plugin sends the same request it always sent — and it costs a second model pass whenever a request carries pins.
• The Console tells you when the character walks backwards and names the frames and three ways out. See Console.
• User Manual… in the Animatica menu opens this documentation.

#Where to go next

• Requirements and Installation — get the plugin running.
• First launch & setup — connect to Cloud or a local server.
• The tool window — a map of the numbered workflow cards and the separate windows.
• Common workflows — your first generated clip in five steps.

Verified against animatica-mobu-plugin@20a8f28 (plugin 1.1)