Animation Overview
Sunday, June 25, 2017 3:15 AMOverview
Animation mode is where you take your fully rigged character and bring it to life! The animation window is split into various sections. This overview will briefly go through each of those sections. For a more in depth look at what each section does, please read through the other pages regarding those specific sections on this site.
Main Toolbar
The Main Toolbar is where the user performs basic playback operations, as well as managing animation clips, ghosting and exporting animation data.
Knots and Splines View
This is where the manipulation of animation data using knots and splines is performed. Animatable bone and deform motor properties can be added into this view for knot and spline editing operations. Various time based operations are available for animatable knots including shifting, cut/copy/paste, setting tangents and mathematical expression based data scripting.
Motors, Motion Paths and Guides View
The entire framework of animation in this application is built off the concept of motors. These are modular behavorial components that can be added to groups of bones or mesh regions. Motors perform various tasks(like IK, Soft Body Physics and more). Motor installation and management is performed in this view.
In addition to motors, one can also create/modify Motion Paths to the scene. These are spline path objects that can have their curves transferred over to character bones as animation data. Various types of transfer operations are available including path following and point targetting.
Lastly, this view allows the adding of image and video guides into the scene. Image Guides serve as a reference for any sort of animation while Video Guides are great for Rotoscoping purposes. Another powerful feature is Motion Extraction from video guides. One can extract and track various features in video guides and then create Motion Paths out of tracked features in video. This functions as a Motion Capture utility for 2D animation.