Plotting (Baking) and Storing Mocap Data

 
 
 

After you've applied mocap data to your rig, cleaned it up, added offsets to it, and so on, you may want to bake all this animation data into fcurves that you can edit. To do this, you plot the animation. When you plot, you can choose to keep or delete an action source after the animation is plotted. See Storing Mocap Animation in an Action Source below for more information.

Plotting evaluates the animation frame by frame and creates fcurves that are applied to the character's rig controls. Plotting is done by first creating an action source, which you can keep or discard after the plotting has finished.

For more information in general about plotting, see Plotting (Baking) Animation [Animation].

To plot the mocap animation

  1. Branch-select the character rig whose animation you want to plot.

    To plot the animation of the rig's children objects as well, branch-select the character and then choose Select Select Child Nodes.

  2. Choose the Tools Plot All Transformations command from the Animate toolbar.

    This plots the local transformation (scaling, rotation, and translation) parameters. All local transformation parameters are plotted, whether they are animated or not.

  3. In the Plot dialog box, specify the frame range and step value, the type of fcurve you want to create, and whether or not you want to keep the resulting action source that is created from plotting.

    See Plot to Action Dialog Box [Properties Reference] for more information on each of the options available.

  4. Click OK to plot the animation.

Storing Mocap Animation in an Action Source

An action source is a "package" of animation. Once you have created an action source, you can apply it on the same model or share it with different models. You can create an entire library of actions and share them among any number of models. You can also load it into the animation mixer as an action clip where you can manipulate it in a number of ways.

For general information about actions, see Actions [Nonlinear Animation in the Animation Mixer].

To save an action source

  1. Select the rig elements that are animated with the mocap data.

  2. Choose Actions Store Animated Parameters - Fcurves from the Animate toolbar.

    You can also choose another "Fcurves" command, depending on how you have your model set up — see Choosing What to Store in an Action [Nonlinear Animation in the Animation Mixer] if you need more information.

  3. In the Store Action Dialog Box [Properties Reference] that appears, give a name to the action source and set the number frames over which you want the action clip to last (the Default In and Out values).

    If you want to add the action source directly to the animation mixer, select the Add Source as a Clip in the Mixer option. You can also set the Clip Offset, which is the frame at which the clip starts in the mixer.

  4. When you click OK, the animation is stored as an action source that you can find in the model's Mixer Sources Animation folder in the explorer.

    All original action sources in a scene are saved in the Animation (Sources) model folder (select the Sources/Clips Animation scope in the explorer to find them).