1 KAYDARA
Liaison’s very first client helped to establish the value of interchange standards in VFX pipelines
Even if you don’t remember Liaison’s first client, you’ll certainly be aware of its technology. Although Kaydara hasn’t existed as a company for almost 20 years, its work lives on in MotionBuilder, still a key part of many motion capture-based pipelines, and its FBX file format.
Founded in Montreal in 1993, Kaydara spotted a gap in the market for tools that would connect real-world data to 3D software. Early on, the firm worked with camera motion control systems, but quickly realised that a more important challenge would be to process motion capture data.
Although it could also be used as a keyframe animation tool, the real strength of Filmbox, Kaydara’s flagship software, was to map imported mocap data to a 3D character, achieved in part through HumanIK, its built-in inverse kinematics system. While Filmbox was indeed used in movie pipelines, one of the highest-profile early projects was the bullet-time effects on The Matrix, its growing adoption in other sectors of the industry and its increasing focus on processing motion data led to it being rebranded as MotionBuilder.
Although Kaydara was acquired by Alias Systems in 2004, before Alias was itself acquired by Autodesk, both MotionBuilder and HumanIK live on under those names, as does FBX, the file format that Kaydara developed to transfer data from Filmbox to other 3D applications. Now widely used for 3D models as well as
