Useful Tools for Nonlinear Animation
There are a number of tools in Softimage that can help you while you’re using the animation mixer. Some of them are specific to the mixer, but others are general tools for animation. For more information in general about animation and tools, see Animating in Softimage
[ Animation ].
You can view thumbnail images on shape, action, and image clips in the animation mixer (audio clips are not supported). For example, you can create a thumbnail image of each pose for a character’s action sources, then view these images on the corresponding action clips. Viewing thumbnails of the action sources or shape sources (shape keys) is especially useful if the source names are not descriptive or indicative of their contents.
For information, see Displaying Clips with Thumbnail Images.
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 animated in any way. For example, if you have an action clip that contains motion capture, you can easily view the flow of that animation to help you blend it against other animation.
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 ].
As well as basic animation ghosting, you can use special Mixer Ghosting to help you work with overlapping clips in the animation mixer. You can see the contribution of each clip’s animation on the object as a ghost in the viewport. This can help you create smooth transitions and weighting between clips, as well as set up offsets for poses. See Ghosting Clips for more information.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5