Generating a Behavior-Ready Actor
When you’ve got your Softimage character all set up as you want it to be for Behavior, you’re ready to generate a new Behavior-ready actor from it. When you generate an actor, the Softimage character is analyzed and a new Behavior actor is created that reflects the topology of the Softimage character, but with the proper parent-child relationships for Behavior.
The Softimage character remains untouched so that you can continue working with it in Softimage as usual.
When you generate the actor, any embedded constraints, expressions, and scripted operators used to create animation on the Softimage character (such as on a rig) get “baked” onto the actor as animation. The actual constraints, expressions, and scripted operators aren’t copied to the actor, only the baked animation.
Before you generate the actor, make sure that you have done the following:
• The character’s hierarchy structure is set up as described in Setting Up Your Character’s Hierarchy for Behavior.
• The character has been initialized (see Initializing the Character).
• The character’s home (default) pose has been set (see Setting the Character’s Home (Default) Pose).
• The character’s nodes have been tagged correctly for Behavior to understand them (see Tagging Nodes for Behavior).
• The character’s animation has been removed and stored in action sources. These action sources need to have been converted into skills (see Preparing the Character’s Animation for Behavior).
To generate a Behavior actor
1. Select the character from which you want to generate an actor.
2. Choose Actor > Generate from the Behavior toolbar.
3. In the dialog box that appears, you can set these various options:
- Optimize removes obvious unnecessary nodes in the actor. For Behavior, the necessary nodes in an actor are the ones that animate and drive envelopes.
- Remove Polygon removes any extra polygon geometry that is not part of the character’s envelope (such as a hat or walking cane) and replaces it with nulls on the actor.
- Skills transfers any of the character’s action sources that have been converted into skills to the actor (see Converting an Action into a Skill).
4. If you want the Behavior actor to have an envelope, set these options:
- Select Envelope to include the character’s envelope for the actor in Behavior. Deselect this option if you don’t want the envelope to be exported with the actor.
- Select Box if you want to replace the character’s existing envelope nodes with bounding boxes that approximate the shape of the envelope vertices they drive.
- If you select Box, you can also select COG. This specifies whether the COG node should get a bounding box as well. By default, this option is off because the COG is sometimes on the floor, and adding a bounding box for the COG may add a large piece of geometry that doesn’t reflect the true shape of the actor.
- If you select Box, you can also set the Factor value. This is the factor of the nominal link length that will be the box’s width for each node. The nominal link length is the maximum link length of the character (link lengths are measured as the distance between the node’s origin and the origin of its child).
5. Click OK to generate the Behavior-ready actor. This may take a few minutes.
If the Softimage character has embedded fcurves, a message appears asking you if these fcurves can be removed if they aren’t important. If you want to keep the fcurves, you must click Cancel and save the fcurves in an action source.
If you click OK, the Generate command overwrites the current fcurves.
6. When the new actor is generated, a model named Bvrmodelname is generated; for example, if your character is in a model named Louis, then the actor generated from it is called BvrLouis.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5