What is Root Motion and How to Set It Up?

I have taken the time to start a tutorial series on creating Root Motion from scratch over on our forums at forums.filmstorm.net.  I feel it would be better to interact and answer questions you might have about these tutorials, also you can share your own workflows and help collaborate with others to enhance everyones game development journeys.

In the tutorial I cover how to set up the root bone and explain what makes Root Motion. I delve into constraints and relation bindings that help transfer rotational and translational data from the hips/pelvis bones to the root bone. We also cover setting up a Character extension in Motionbuilder for easy baking when moving between Skeleton and Control Rig editing.

Once you learn how everything goes together, it will make your motion editing that much faster and more efficient.

I can't wait for you to try it out!

What is Root Motion and How to Set It Up?

This is a very common question we get a lot in game development - what is Root Motion? Root Motion is simply the “root” bone of a skeleton structure that is animated to move the character/object through the 3D world. You can think of it as drawing an invisible point down under your own center of g…

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If you're feeling adventurous after doing this tutorial, check out the advanced tutorial where we set up a root motion turn left 90 degree animation. We cover how to correctly clear baked root data and calculate which rotation direction the root bone should follow in order for it rotate correctly. We then use filters to clean data to make the root bone ready for keyframing.

[Advanced] Root Motion Directional Editing

From our last tutorial, we covered how to set up the root bone to receive hip/pelvis bone rotation and translations to move it through the world creating Root Motion. We will now cover how to edit the baked data inside our control rig to match the direction we want to go. For this example, we are …

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