You can import a NURBS or polygonal character and continue to animate it in Softimage as you would in SOFTIMAGE|3D. However, chains imported from a SOFTIMAGE|3D scene retain their original hierarchical structure, which means that an effector’s orientation and position will be global, not local.
Softimage offers a better solution for character rigging: when you create chains in Softimage, the effector is the child of the chain root. This means you can create local animation on the effector that can be translated with the root. In other words, you can drag the entire hierarchy without the effector wanting to “stick” to the scene’s global coordinates as they do in SOFTIMAGE|3D. You no longer have to constrain a null to the effector and parent it to the chain root.
You can convert SOFTIMAGE|3D skeletons to Softimage ones by reparenting the effectors and changing the effector’s properties (see the illustration on the next page). However, if the skeleton is animated, its animation is global and you’ll need to copy all the function curves to local coordinates, which may be a daunting task.
If you want to rig your character completely in Softimage, you can simply import the model in its default pose.
For more information about animating with skeletons, see Character Animation and for information about copying function curves, see Animation.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5