fbrelation

fbrelation is a simple declarative language for creating MotionBuilder relation constraints. After writing a lot of cumbersome scripts to manipulate relation constraints with pyfbsdk, I decided to take a stab at improving that process as a weekend project. The resulting language takes inspiration from Graphviz DOT and looks like this:

linear_interpolate
{
    # Macro input boxes
    a [input="Number"]
    b [input="Number"]
    t [input="Number"]

    # Operations
    sub  [group="Number", type="Subtract (a - b)"]
    mult [group="Number", type="Multiply (a x b)"]
    add  [group="Number", type="Add (a + b)"]

    # Macro output
    r [output="Number"]

              b -> sub.a   # b - a
              a -> sub.b

     sub.Result -> mult.a  # (b - a) * t
              t -> mult.b

              a -> add.a   # a * ((b - a) * t)
    mult.Result -> add.b

     add.Result -> r
}

Documentation

Online documentation is available here:

• http://awforsythe.com/fbrelation/

Full documentation is included with the source and can be built using Sphinx.

Limitations

There are a few major areas for improvement in the current implementation:

• When the interpreter creates relation constraints, it does not arrange their boxes in a way that's particularly organized or aesthetically pleasing. Procedural layout functionality could be added, and support could be added for manually specifying x and y coordinates in boxes' attribute lists.

• Some syntactic sugar could be added for various shortcuts in connection declarations. For example, it'd be handy to be able to declare a connection straight from a vector output to a number input, and have the interpreter automatically create the necessary converters, e.g.: cube.Translation.X -> camera.Roll

• Constants can not currently be connected to input nodes, e.g.: (90.0, 0.0, 0.0) -> null.Lcl Rotation. As discussed below, the API doesn't support connecting constants at all, so this addition would need to use a sender component to contain these values as custom properties.

Additionally, some significant limitations of the MotionBuilder API prevent this library from being very useful in production:

• The API does not provide a means of plugging constant values into a box's input nodes.

• The API does not provide a means of renaming the animation nodes of macro input and output boxes from the default names of "Input" and "Output".

• Once a function box is added to a relation constraint, there's no way to determine the box's type or group name. This omission from the API makes it impossible to reliably serialize already-authored relation constraints into fbrelation programs, meaning that the library only works one-way.