XSIBlog

Animating something by yourself, or setting up a rig for a group is two different things. One person will do just fine with the basic keying workflow, mark+key, for rigs usually what needs to and can be keyed is controlled. People are using various tricks for this

The Dead Simple Keying Workflow

Every XSI user understands the basic workflow. “Mark”, or select, a parameter, and hit “K” to key it.
Actually, it’’s possible to use XSI without ever knowing anything about marking, because the basic SRT tools mark what’’s appropriate for you.
This is a good ”next gen” version of the ”Set Key” menu in SI3D, where you”d click the SaveKey button and pick in the Windows Start menu-style hierachy of eeeevvverything that’’s keyable, and then middle mouse button to repeatedly key the same things.

Behind the scene, parameters are not in fact directly “selected”. The Marking list is in fact just a list of strings, a relative path to parameters, and XSI commands will try to match these strings against the parameter names on the current object at the moment of executing a command.

Selective Keying

As you”re building your rigs, quickly you end up wanting to key translation, and only translation, on one object, and rotation on “Y” on another. Ideally you want to key everything all at once so that the rig is ”locked” at every key and there is no random behaviour caused by not having keyed everything you intented.

This is all doable with scripts and buttons that will key exactly the parameters of interests, and people do this, however XSI has services for that built-in.

Marking Sets and Setting Branch Keys (ALT+K)

Marking sets are cool and they”re also a “demo” of sorts of the architecture of XSI. Basically, it’’s a property set that’’s created which contains links to the parameters that you want to key.

In fact, there is nothing special behind Marking Sets, it’’s directly using the Custom Parameter Set commands, and creates a property set called “MarkingSet”. Then, the “Set Key Using Marking Set” commands simply looks for a custom property set with that exact name and set keys on everything.

There is a second command “Set Branch Key” [..."Using Marking Set", in XSI 4.2] that does the same thing, but searches the entier branch of selected objects for the Marking Sets. It’’s mapped to ATL+K.

These commands are all in the Animation menu that is that the bottom of the interface.

Here Comes …Keyable Parameters

In V5.0 we introduce Keyable Parameters, and this is where we”ll focus in the future. Of course, Maya users are familiar with Keyable Parameters, and the words mean the same thing as in Maya. At this point, although it can be confusing to have ”animatable parameters” and ”keyable parameters”, IMO it’’s probably best to not try to invent a new word for it, so we will use the same.

Keyable Parameters do the same job as marking sets : they allow you to select which parameters you want to key. By default, local kinestate - scale, rotate, translate - is keyable.

The Keying Panel is the panel that shows you which parameters are keyable on the current object. What you see is what is going to be keyed. The Keyable Parameter Editor allows you to choose which parameters are keyable or not.

IMHO, it’’s a little more clear in XSI what these things do, because the Keying Panel isn”t doing double-duty as a generic property panel, which it isn”t meant to be. It’’s really a Panel for Keying. In the future we”ll continue to invest into more animation workflow items in there.

We”ve also added a few script commands to get the keyable parameters.

Save Key Command Mapping

The most critical user preference setting in XSI animation is in the animation menu at the bottom of the screen, is it called Save Key Command Mapping. These are the three choices :

On Marked Parametes

This is the default XSI method, pre-keyable parameters. Hitting “K” will set keys on the parameters that are currently Marked on the currently selected objects. Hitting ALT+K with set a branch key on the Marking Sets it finds on the selected objects.

On All Keyable Parameters

This is a Maya-like behaviour and it’’s the default in QWERTY Interaction.
However, XSI users should use it as well, but obviously we couldn”t put that as the default in V5.0 without causing some confusion with current users.

Hitting “K” will set keys on all the keyable parameters on the selected objects. Hitting ALT+K will save a key on all keyable parameter in the selected branch, no need for Marking Sets.

On All Marked Keyable Parameters

This is a mix of both, it sets keys on the intersection of both keyable AND marked parameters.
For example, if you”re in the Translate tool, it will set a key on the position of the object, IF the parameters are keyable. This is a good mode as well for XSI users, because it means that the transform tool will key the parameters you expect, unless you removed their ”keyable” flag. (Note that you could also use Locking to protect parameters from being keyed)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Animation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.