Recycling animations?
Sonofbelmont
Posts: 147
Hi
Is there any way to save a animation created for a figure in one project and load it onto the same figure in a different project?
without using BVH files? I've tested exporting a BVH file in the past and it doesn't seem to save any of the hip translation.
any help would be appreciated
thanks
Comments
never mind I'm pretty sure I've figured out how to do it now, you create clips.
If it's to be used in another Carrara project, you can create an NLA clip and save it to your Clips browser.
This is very basic. There's a ton of functionality that NLAs can unlock.
Once the figure is animated, you can select it in the scene's instances and up above you should see an NLA tab. Select that and then select Create Master Clip. You'll get a dialogue with some options. For the offset option, I usually select the figures hip. You'll also want the Delete Keyframes option enabled. Click Okay. All animation data is gone from the figure. Click the Clips tab on the right of your screen and you should see an icon that says Clip. You can select it and rename it to something descriptive if you wish. Drag the clip onto the NLA track for the figure (visible in the timeline/sequencer). and try it out. To save the clip, select the Clip browser and drag the clip to the browser.
The clip should be used on figures with the same rigging. You should be able to use a clip created using M4 with V4 or any of the version 4 figures. M3 or V3 on the other hand may not work correctly because the rig is different. You can add your own NLA tracks to your own figures or rigs. You can even add them to objects grouped together as an animation group.
Oh sure, after I've typed all that! ;-)
Another really excellent option is Fenric's BVH/PZ2 Exporter for Carrara, which enables us to export animated poses in the Poser pose format - which allows us to share the poses with others using different software.
While we're on the subject,
You should also know that, once you drag clips from your browser into the clips panel, you have the ability to simply load the keyframes from the clip, rather than using the clip, itself. This can be useful if you want to have the keyframes for editing, without editing the clip.
Just select your figure, like you would save a clip, go to the NLA tab and select: "Load Clip Data"
You can also create additional NLA tracks for the same figure, and layer clips. It's a pretty cool feature.