What Is Character Animation All About?
Character animation in Softimage is all about bringing your characters to life. Even though you’re working in a virtual environment, your job is to make characters seem believable in their movements and expression. In Softimage, you’ll find everything you need: from envelopes and skeletons to control rigs and weight painting, it’s all there.
Skeletons are usually covered with an enveloping model or object (generically referred to as an envelope), which can be deformed (stretched, twisted, or compressed), depending on how the skeleton components are moved, rotated, or scaled. You usually create an enveloping model first, then create the skeleton to fit inside it.
A skeleton provides a framework for a model and can be used to pose or deform it intuitively, just as the human skeleton provides a framework for the body. The structure of your skeleton determines every aspect of how you move, from picking up a pencil to running. Similarly, an Autodesk Softimage skeleton provides an interior framework for a model, and how you build a skeleton will determine how your model will move when animated.
For more information about skeletons, see Building Skeletons.
Applying the Envelope to the Skeleton
After you’ve created the skin and a skeleton to fit inside it, you can apply the skin to the skeleton. Applying the skin (called enveloping) also involves setting how the different parts of the body are weighted to the different bones in the skeleton.
For more information about envelopes, see Envelopes.
Part of the process of setting up a character is often to create a control rig. These rigs help you to pose and animate a character more quickly and accurately than without one. While simple characters may not require a rig, a character that is complex or needs to do complicated movements will probably need a rig.
Luckily, Softimage has a number of tools to help you create rigs for biped, biped dog leg, and quadruped characters. You can load rig guides that you adjust to match the proportion of your character, then create a rig based on those proportions. There are also tools to help you easily create shadows rigs and manage the constraints between rigs and their shadows rigs.
For more information about creating control rigs, see Character Rigging.
Skeleton chains are manipulated using inverse kinematics (IK) and forward kinematics (FK). You can use either method on a chain at any time, and easily switch between the two or even blend them on the same chain.
• IK is a goal-oriented way of animating: you move the effector (end) of a chain in place and Softimage calculates how the chain reaches that goal.
• FK allows for complete control of the chain’s behavior because you rotate each joint’s position. Positioning a skeleton’s hand to reach an apple means rotating each joint in the arm, from the shoulder to the wrist and fingers.
For more information about animating the skeleton, see Animating Characters.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5