Motive comes with an animation pipeline that converts FBX files to RigAnims. The RigAnims are stored as FlatBuffer files with the .fplanim extension.

Usage: anim_pipeline [-v|-d|-i] [-o OUTPUT_FILE]
           [-s SCALE_TOLERANCE] [-r ROTATE_TOLERANCE]
           [-t TRANSLATE_TOLERANCE] [-a DERIVATIVE_TOLERANCE]
           [--repeat|--norepeat] FBX_FILE

Pipeline to convert FBX animations into FlatBuffer animations.
Outputs a .fplanim file with the same base name as FBX_FILE.

Options:
  -v, --verbose         output all informative messages
  -d, --details         output important informative messages
  -i, --info            output more than details, less than verbose.
  -o, --out OUTPUT_FILE file to write .fplanim file to;
                        can be an absolute or relative path;
                        when unspecified, uses base FBX name
                        + .fplanim
  -s, --scale SCALE_TOLERANCE
                        max deviation of output scale curves
                        from input scale curves, unitless
  -r, --rotate ROTATE_TOLERANCE
                        max deviation of output rotate curves
                        from intput rotate curves, in degrees
  -t, --translate TRANSLATE_TOLERANCE
                        max deviation of output translate curves
                        from input translate curves, in scene's
                        units of distance
  -a, --angle DERIVATIVE_TOLERANCE
                        max deviation of curve derivatives,
                        considered as an angle in the x/y plane
                        (e.g. derivative 1 ==> 45 degrees),
                        in degrees.
  --repeat, --norepeat  mark the animation as repeating or not
                        repeating. A repeating animation cycles
                        over and over. If neither option is
                        specified, the animation is marked as
                        repeating when it starts and ends
                        with the same pose and derivatives.

Bone Assignment

The anim_pipeline traverses the FBX's scene graph in depth-first order. A node is output if it is the ancestor of a mesh node–that is, if it has vertex data somewhere under it. Every node that is output is assigned a bone. Each bone is animated with its own MatrixAnim. Together, the series of MatrixAnims creates a RigAnim.

Each MatrixAnim is composed of the minimum set of matrix operations that will generate the animation. For example, if a node is animated by rotating about its x-axis, then the MatrixAnim will contain a single operation for kRotateAboutX. This creates a much smaller data set than outputting all scale, rotation, and translation values for every bone.

The bone heirarchy output by anim_pipeline matches the bone hierarchy output by anim_pipeline with the -h (hierarchy).

Pre-built Binaries

Pre-built binaries for the anim_pipeline are distributed in the bin directory.

Windows 7: bin/Windows/Release/anim_pipeline.exe
Mac OS X (10.10.5 Yosemite): bin/Darwin/anim_pipeline
Linux (Ubuntu 64-bit): bin/Linux/anim_pipeline

To build the anim_pipeline from source, please see building anim_pipeline.