Technical Directors and animators need to have the ability to prevent body parts from receiving keys. For example, if there is more than one animator working on a character rig and the Technical Director does not want animation to be created to parts of the character, one way of achieving this is to lock or mute properties and channels.
You can lock or mute properties or channels to prevent any changes to the animation from happening on the selected property or channel. You cannot merge animation on a locked property or channel. Locked and muted properties and channels are retained when the .fbx file is exported and imported to the Maya software and re-imported to MotionBuilder.
You can lock properties or channels to prevent any changes to the animation from happening on the selected property or channel. You cannot change values nor add keyframes on a locked property or channel and you cannot merge animation on a locked property or channel. Locked properties and channels are retained when the .fbx file is exported and imported to the Maya software and re-imported to MotionBuilder.
The visual feedback of locked transforms on manipulators enables you to quickly identify what is locked or partially locked. This visual feedback is very useful especially if (for example) multiple individuals work on the same character rig and the Technical Director does not want animation to be created to parts of the character.
You mute and unmute animated Transformation properties and channels similarly to locking and unlocking Transformation properties and channels to prevent any changes to the animation from happening on the selected property or channel. When an animated Transformation property or channel is muted, its current value becomes the static value for this property or channel. Muted properties and channels are retained when the .fbx file is exported and imported to the Maya software and re-imported to MotionBuilder.
Now that you can lock and mute properties, you can also Bake (plot) these properties. When doing this, you can choose to clear the locked properties after the baking process automatically. Unlike locked properties, muted properties are Baked (plotted), cleared, and unmuted by default.
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