It’s inevitable: the director took a look at the animations for this character. It looks good but now he has some comments and wants to make a few changes. For example, you now need to add a tool or weapon to the character so it’s going to affect many of the existing motion clips. This is especially problematic when the change affects a key pose or move because many other moves and poses are usually linked to it. Changing the key pose or move means changing several other animations too so that the transitions are smooth.
Luckily, this isn’t a problem in Softimage. You can easily add non-destructive offsets to the mocap data by either using animation layers, by mixing fcurves with an action clip, or by creating action clip offsets in the animation mixer.
You can easily set a layer of keys as an offset to mocap animation by using animation layers. Layers let you keyframe as you would normally in Softimage, but keep those keys in a separate layer of animation so that it doesn’t affect the base mocap animation.
For example, let’s say you have a mocap clip in the mixer of a character fighting with a weapon. Now the director wants to use a new set of weapons that will affect this motion. With layering, you can simply set keys for the character’s hands and arms (and whatever else is affected) using the new weapon. This offset is added on top of the mocap clip without ever touching its original data.
After you’ve added one or more layers of keys and you’re happy with the results, you can also collapse the layers to “bake” them into the base layer of animation.
See Animation Layers [ Animation ] for more information.
Mixing Fcurves with Action Clips
Normally, when there is an action clip in the mixer, it overrides any other animation on that object that covers the same frames. However, you can blend fcurves directly with an action clip over the same frames. This allows you to blend mixer animation with scene level animation.
For example, you can paste a clip in the mixer that contains the final animation for an object, then you can blend it with other fcurve animation you have added to that object, such as a slight offset or a minor adjustment to a mocap clip.
For more information, see Mixing Fcurves with Action Clips
[ Nonlinear Animation ].
Clip effects let you adjust the animation in an action clip in the animation mixer without affecting the original animation in the action source. Clip effects add values “on top” of a clip, such as noise or offsets. They make it easy to modify motion capture data in action clips.
Because the effect is an independent unit, you can easily activate or deactivate it, allowing you to toggle between the clip’s original animation and the animation resulting from the clip effect. This makes it easy to test out changes to the animation without ever touching the original mocap source.
For more information about clip effects, see Modifying Action Clips with Clip Effects [ Nonlinear Animation ].
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5