Animatica in Motion Builder

Two months ago we shipped Animatica in Blender. The response told us the same thing our early partners had been saying all along: AI motion belongs inside the tool you already animate in, not in a browser tab you round-trip through. So we built it for the tool a lot of you actually finish in.

Today we're shipping Animatica in Motion Builder — directable AI motion running inside Autodesk MotionBuilder. Write a prompt, hit Generate, and editable keyframes get plotted straight onto your characterized skeleton. No FBX export, no retarget pass, no separate viewer.

What Animatica generates

Under the hood is Kimodo, a text-conditioned diffusion model for 3D character motion. It takes a humanoid skeleton and a description — "a person walks forward, breaks into a sprint, then slides to a stop" — and writes the motion that fits.

We didn't train the model from scratch. The upstream research is from NVIDIA's Toronto AI Lab. What Animatica adds is the path from that model to a MotionBuilder timeline — a maintained fork with fixes for common install and runtime issues, an open-source backbone that exposes the model over an open HTTP protocol, and a MotionBuilder plugin that drives it.

How to run Animatica in Motion Builder

MotionBuilder is FBX-native, so there's no import/export dance to set up. Four steps:

1. Install the plugin. Download the latest release and drop it into your MotionBuilder Python plugins folder (or run the installer). An Animatica tool appears in the menu.
2. Sign in to Animatica — or point the plugin at your own MMCP-compatible server for self-hosting. Both paths use the same plugin and the same protocol.
3. Characterize a skeleton and write a prompt. Any HumanIK-characterized humanoid works; the cloud retargets server-side. Add constraints for explicit control: keyframes on the control rig for the poses that matter, a motion path for the root, effectors to pin hands or feet.
4. Hit Generate. Animatica plots editable keyframes onto your character. Accept the take to keep it, reject to roll back to your source animation — your work is preserved either way.

That's the whole flow, without leaving MotionBuilder.

What it feels like

Animatica respects what you've already authored. You don't lose your work to the model — the model works around it.

• Pin the poses that matter. Key your moments on the control rig and the model fills the in-betweens. Every keyframe is a hard constraint, never overwritten on regeneration.
• Sketch a motion path. The character's root locks to it; the body stays alive on top. No retiming, no foot-skate.
• Pin a hand to an effector. That hand stays where you put it across the whole clip.
• Type the action. Plain-language prompts turn into clean 30-fps motion plotted onto your character.

After Generate you get a non-destructive preview: Accept keeps the take, Reject rolls back to your source animation.

Hosted or self-hosted

Animatica's hosted service handles the GPU and ships the full feature stack — server-side retargeting to your rig, text-to-pose, foot-skate cleanup. Sign in and you're generating motion in MotionBuilder in minutes.

Or run it yourself. motionmcp-kimodo is the Apache-2.0 reference backbone — runs the model on your GPU over the open MMCP protocol, no telemetry, no cloud round-trip. Same plugin, same protocol — switch by pointing the plugin at your own server.

Same protocol, more tools

Blender first, now MotionBuilder. Because every integration talks the same open MMCP protocol, each new DCC is a thin client over the same backbone — and the motion you generate lands as clean FBX keyframes that carry across the rest of your pipeline.

Get the plugin at animatica.ai/motion-builder, and the full setup and panel reference is in the documentation. Read the source on GitHub. We'd love to hear what's missing.