There are many tools in Softimage made specifically for animation, but these are some general tools that are particularly useful for character animation.
Animation ghosting, also known as onion-skinning, lets you display a series of snapshots of animated objects at frames and/or keyframes behind and/or ahead of the current frame. This lets you easily visualize the motion of an object, which can help you improve its timing and flow.
Drawing ghosts only on keyframes lets you quickly see where a character’s keys are. If you add or remove a key with ghosting on, the ghosts are immediately updated to reflect the change.
You can use different display modes for ghosting, such as the character’s geometry, motion trails, or simply points.
For more information, see Ghosting Animated Objects
[ Animation ].
Rotoscopy for Making Models and Animating
Use rotoscoped images of models to act as a template from which you can create skeletons or envelopes. For example, import an image of an animal in an appropriate pose into Softimage in the Rotoscopy view, create the envelope to match it, and create the skeleton to fit within the model.
As well, you can use rotoscoped images to help you animate a character, such as setting up and matching to a walk cycle sequence.
For more information on rotoscopy, see Rotoscopy [ Interface and Tools ].
A useful tool to help make keying quick and easy is the character key set. This lets you set up which parameters of an object should be keyed. Once you create the character key set, you simply press K or click the keyframe icon and all the parameters in it are automatically keyed—you don’t even have to select anything first.
For more information, see Keying with Character Key Sets
[ Animation ].
Keyable Parameters in the Keying Panel
In much the same way as a character key set works, you can work with keyable parameters in the keying panel. You decide which parameters for an object you want to always key and set them as being keyable. Then when you select an object, the keyable parameters are the only ones that appear in the keying panel and are keyed when you click the keyframe icon or press K.
The keyable parameter information is kept with the object. By default, the keyable parameters include an object’s Local Transform parameters, but it’s an easy task to change which parameters you want to be keyable for an object.
For more information, see Keying Keyable Parameters in the Keying Panel
[ Animation ].
Setting a Neutral Pose with Zero Values
When you’re creating a skeleton, its neutral pose is often the character with outstretched arms and legs, making it easy to weight the envelope and adjust its textures. However, this doesn’t always give the best values for animating the skeleton’s local transformation values.
To overcome this problem, you can create a neutral pose which uses zero for its local transformation values (0 for rotation and translation, 1 for scaling). Then when you key the character’s values, they reflect the relative difference from zero, and not a value that’s difficult to use. And when you can select a chain element and enter zero for its local rotation, for example (often referred to as zeroing out), it returns to this neutral pose.
For information on how to do this, see Creating Neutral Poses for Skeletons.
Preferred Transformation Tool (Transform Setup)
When keying an object, there is a good chance that you will always animate an object using the same transformation tool. If you create a transformation setup for it, you can make sure that this same tool is automatically activated when you select an object.
This is very useful for the control objects of your rig —for example, select the center-of-gravity control and the Translate tool is automatically activated, select the spine control and the Rotate tool is automatically activated, and so on.
You can apply a transform Setup property using Get > Property > Transform Setup in any toolbar—see Transform Setup [ Transformations ] for more information.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5