Characters, groups, and subcharacters

Characters in Trax

Character sets or characters are collections of animated objects, parts of objects, or attributes. If you create a clip for an animated object that is not already part of a character set, then the Trax Editor automatically creates a character for the clip. In the Trax Editor, characters appear as the first level of track hierarchy. This means that characters are the parents or top-level groups for all their tracks, groups, and subcharacters. See Track hierarchy.

See also:

• What are character sets?
• Animating Character Sets
• character

Groups in Trax

Groups are arbitrary collections of clips for a single character. You can use groups to separate and isolate specific sequences of your character’s animation. See Group and ungroup clips. A character or subcharacter can have multiple groups, but you can not have groups within groups.

Subcharacters in Trax

Subcharacter sets or subcharacters are bundles of related character set attributes. You can use subcharacters to simultaneously key and manipulate groups of attributes. See Create subcharacter sets in the Character Setup guide.

Subcharacters are on the same level of the track hierarchy as character groups. See Subcharacters. In the Trax Editor, subcharacters always appear below a character’s groups. Characters can have multiple subcharacters.

When working with subcharacters in the Trax Editor, note the following:

• If you load a character that contains subcharacters into Trax, all that character’s subcharacters automatically appear in the track view area.
• If you create a subcharacter for a character that has existing clips, the subcharacter inherits the existing clips so that no animation is lost.
• If you turn on Include Subcharacters in Clip when you create a clip, Maya creates a single source clip that includes all animation curves for the character and all its subcharacters. See Include Subcharacters in Clip.