Motion warping in the trax editor

[pixxel]

Hi everyone.

I've using the trax editor for the first time in production for about a week now, and I'm running into problems for which I'm not finding a solution in the manual.

Very often when I try to do motion warping in the trax editor (keyframing on top of animation clips) my IK shoots into infinity. The problem is somewhat corrected when I save the new animation to a clip and I set it to relative, but I still get some weird snaps every now and then. And even if I get it to work that way I'm losing the interactivity of seeing how my new animation looks on top of the existing one as I set the keyframes...

Does anybody know what I'm doing wrong or where I can find a good trax editor tutorial?

Thanks!

[pixxel]

I've also read in the Maya documentation that as you set keys on the character set the range where those keys is applied appears as a blue region in the Timeline of the Trax Editor. However I've been doing this and I don't see a blue area appear or any other kind of visual feedback in the trax editor.

So if anybody knows about this help would be greatly appreciated.

[joojaa]

relative movnemts dot take into account the fact that your caracter is rotated!

[pixxel]

The problem is precisely that my rotations are NOT being taken as relative when I set those keyframes on top of the clip animation.

One example... my character is holding a machine gun and in his gun arm I have animated the recoil motion and saved it into a clip.

Now I want to add animation that moves the arm around so that he spreads his firing, so I rotate a little bit to the left and I set a keyframe. As soon as I do this the arm shoots out of place, but if I deactivate the old clip it appears in the correct position.

Now you could say... "why don't you deactivate the old clips, do your new animation, save it to a clip, switch it to relative and THEN reactivate the old clips?". That actually works fine, but I need to be seeing my old animation as I set the keyframes for reasons of timing the new motion to events of the existing one.

So I'm still stuck. Any ideas?

[joojaa]

are you sre theres no translation involved vith rotations? so it just pure roatation then is it?

[pixxel]

I'm using a certain amount of translation as well, but like I said, it works fine if I disable the existing clip, keyframe my new animation, save it to a clip, make it relative and then re-enable the previous clip. So it's not a problem of the animation being relative, since it does work when I make the new clip relative.

I just can't get the thing to work when I'm keyframing the character with an existing clip enabled.

[joojaa]

Bingo, traslate would probably be the cause for things being screwed up. Dont make me draw a picture.

You see if Clip 1 rotates the object and clip 2 would translate the object. 99% of people would asume the object would move in the rotated direction, this would be WRONG.

The global translation would still be in the same direction! Now could we use local translates... The answer is errr... yes and no. you could have a groub that controlls the direction but this would be complicated, and a feedback loop would be impossible because of the DAG structure (you dont want to go on this avenue since animatinga cyclic animation would totaly kill scrubbing performance).

Solution only use rotational info, and do the translation manualy. Or simulate, this is a endles swap of problems you know.

[contrabazista]

hey guys does any one knows wher did the motion warping went?
I cannot find it in maya. as if it misteriosly dissapered.

please help to shine some light on it .
thanks

yury