Softimage’s ergonomic layout allows for maximum workflow as we explore the 1^st stage of the Animation process. We will approach animation as one would approach building the structure of a house, from general to specific, finishing with a completed animation ready for rendering. Throughout this series of tutorials, we will also be covering the traditional approach to building animation as well as reviewing the fundamental principles of Animation.

Before we begin, we need to ask ourselves if we are prepared? There are a few tools we need to put into our belts before beginning.

For those of you reading along, I’m assuming a competent working knowledge of Softimage 3.8 SP2.

These tutorials assume that you are in possession of a working constrained character. If you are lacking a character, I have provided a working low-res actor named "Twiggy". He is stored under the database of the same name. Twiggy is locked into his Constraint rig, and works extremely well for most any animation exercise. The exercises are meant for use with the character provided, as discussion of the hierarchy, terminology, assemblage etc. depend upon the way the character is built and named.

Aside from your character, we are all going to need to be on the same page when we begin animation. I spend a small amount of time organizing myself before beginning to animate. The time it saves me down the road is incalculable. An efficient workflow allows for more creative output. Here are some tips to start you on the road to animation efficiency:

If you haven’t already done so, link up the TWIGGY database through your DB manager. Open the scene that appears before you. As promised, Twiggy is ready to roll. Through the first portion of this tutorial, we are going to customize the Twiggy and the Softimage environment, fine tune the hot rod if you will. When we begin animating the time you spend here will really show through in your working speed.

In your Perspective Window, click on your layout icon to bring up a menu. Place a check in the box beside the Field Guides option, and then click OK. When you render animation for broadcast, television cuts off a portion of the action around the borders of your image.

Activating the Field guides allows for 3 consecutively smaller rectangles to be superimposed over a chosen window . The middle rectangle is of chief concern to us. It shows the ‘action safe’ area of our animation. That is; any animation that takes place within these boundaries will show up on the television. The inner rectangle depicts a ‘title safe area’.

When animating title sequences, or rolling credits, keeping all letters and numbers within this area ensures that they will show up on the television. I can’t think of anything worse than creating a touching piece of animation, only to find that it’s been cut off by the constraints of our televisions.

When I first started animating, one of the most painful tasks was trying to select the object that I needed to animate. I can remember looking through a sprawling mass of twisting splines, and nulls, trying to select that elusive joint, or constraint. The amount of time I lost searching for the correct object was both expensive and frustrating.

Softimage allows you to create groupings of objects that can be mass selected at any time via two keystrokes. Coupled with the ability to make groupings of objects unselectable, we can start to reduce the amount of clutter in our scene. To demonstrate what I mean, let us begin by creating a selection group for Twiggy’s geometry. It’ll probably be easiest to do this in the schematic window. Start by going into multi mode, and then selecting each piece of geometry one node at a time.To make it easier for you, I’ve colored Twiggy’s geometry Yellow, a pretty gawdy color, but very easily identifiable.

Once you’ve selected all of Twiggy’s mesh pieces, click on SELECT > SET NAMED SELECTION. A box will pop up where you can type in a name for your group. Give it the name GEOMETRY, and then click on the CREATE button.

If you look to the right of your character’s schematic, a larger black box will have appeared.

Return to single mode, and then select the box twice using the space bar. The first time you select the box, it simply turns white, however the second time you select the box, it turns black, and all of the objects stored under the grouping will be selected. Notice how, you are now in Multi mode. Clear your selection.

Now, let’s create a selection group for Twiggy’s chain roots and effectors. I hardly ever animate a character from its effectors or chain roots, so why bother with the hassle of having it clutter up your screen? Here’s a shortcut that will enable you to find and select a series of scene objects easier.

Press Enter. A database chapters list will appear. Make sure you’re in the TWIGGY database and then enter the MODELS chapter.

Click on SEARCH.

In the pop up window, ensure that you uncheck the exact String option and then enter "eff" as a search string. Press FIND ALL. Since I don’t use my effectors or chains when animating, I usually neglect to name the piece, which serves our purposes well.

They will all respond to my search string which enables me to click on the SELECT NODE button to select all of the pieces. Softimage enters Multi mode and mass selects the pieces, which I then group with a SELECT > SET_ NAMED_SELECTION.

Do the same for TWIGGY’s chain roots using "chn" as your search string. Create another NAMED _SELECTION.

The most important named selections are of course the ones that are going to allow you to rapidly pose your character, and then with a few sly mouse strokes and a couple of hotkey shots, keyframe rotations and Explicit Translations capturing that rough pose.

I’ve colored all of Twiggy’s bones blue. Select them in the schematic window. We also want to make sure that we select his COG, and his ARMS, LEGS, and TORSO constraints. When you’ve got all of them selected create a named selection called KEY_ROTATIONS. Selecting this group will allow for us to key the rotations at one shot

The EXPLICITS named selection consists of fewer scene objects. The COG, R_ARM, L_ARM, R_FOOT, L_FOOT, and SHOULDERS make up this small group. Create a selection group KEY_EXPLICITS.

I’m a damage control guy, so I use this next Selection group for when I make a mistake that is quite common in 3D Animation.

Joints in Softimage don’t like to be keyed with Explicit Translations. You’ll find that many times a brilliant pose that you’ve sculpted and keyed, ends up looking all mangled and hunched when you return to it in your timeline. Chances are you’ve keyed a joint or two with Explicit Translation keyframes. So I create another selection group called NO_EXPLICITS which is only comprised of Twiggy’s blue colored joints.. If I inadvertently key a joint with Explicit Translations, all I do is Select the NO_EXPLICITS group and destroy the Explicit Translation data with an F-CURVE RESET> OBJECT> EXPLICIT TRANSLATION > ALL. 9 times out of 10, this one will get you out of your twisted up jam.

Okay, so, your character’s selection groups have all been created, now it’s time to determine which selection groups (read layers) can be hidden, or merely made unselectable.

The Chain Root and Effectors selection groups clutter up our screen with useless data, so why not just hide them. Select the two groups so that the geometry gets highlighted, and then perform a smooth DISPLAY > HIDE > TOGGLE DESEL HIDDEN. The Null objects disappear.

Make sure you’ve cleared your selection (SPACE+C), and then select the GEOMETRY selection group. We don’t want to hide the geometry, we just don’t want to be able to select it. To do this click on SELECT> SELECTABILITY> TOGGLE SELECTION.

Good, we’re halfway through setup, let’s make the final push, and really start to fine tune our control.

Click on PREFERENCES > ANIMATION. In the pop up box, select constant for the f-curves interpolation. During the beginning stage of the animation process, we are not going to allow Softimage to control our in-betweens. Rather, we are going to rely completely upon ourselves to provide timing from one pose to the next pose.

In this same pop up box, you can also click on NO CONFIRMATION in the KEY EDITING section at the top, as well as COLORED, in the KEYFRAME FEEDBACK section at the bottom.

Colored keyframe feedback is a great tool to see which objects have keyframes stored at a given time. When your character is Tree selected in Single mode, and you are scrolling through the character’s keys, the constraint object, or joint will highlight in red upon scrubbing to the frame that the object was keyed.

The No confirmation option that you checked in the key editing section is a handy time saver that allows you to make changes to keyframed objects without having to re-key the changes. For example, You’ve created a pose to pose block in of your character, and are just tweaking some of the poses upon review of your first pass. You can make changes to the keys, by say moving an arm a little higher and to the right, furling the brow that touch more, wrinkle that sneer, and focus his gaze on the camera, and then move on. No re-keys needed.

Make sure that you save these animation preferences in a setup file, so that you can access them at a given keystroke instead of having to set them each new time you begin a Softimage session. PREFERENCES> SETUP FILE> SAVE will allow you to save an .STS file to a given directory. Load it at any future time with PREFERENCES> SETUP FILE> LOAD.

This is one of the most important Animation Options that you can set. It’ll be put to good use further on down the Animation Process when we begin to work on in-betweening, and getting our hands dirty with the F-Curve editor. The option simply allows you to call up an objects F-curve, and then manipulate the f-curve, seeing real time updates to the changes being made to the characters pose at the selected frame.

OPTIONAL-

When I compare the two methods of scaling available in Softimage, I tend to favor Classic Scaling for very bouncy, jaunty cartoon style animation. Whereas regular scaling affects each joint depending on its own centre, Classic Scaling allows the centres of an object within a given branch to be located at the same coordinates in Cartesian space. The result is a more predictable method of creating scaling animations. Whenever I scale an arm with regular scaling, the fingers become extremely distorted, however with Classic Scaling, note the difference. This option will definitely ease your burden if you need to create subtle weight or drooping skin types of animation.

Not an urgent change by any means but makes your scene neater by removing those Deep blue Proximity sensors from Twiggys effectors. Essentially, all they do is give you an Out of Bounds marker for your chain roots. If an Effector travels inside of the blue zone of its chain root parent, very unpredictable results will occur. You’ll figure them out pretty quickly.

Our scene is so light using the low res Twiggy, that we can afford to animate Twiggy in shaded mode. Sine Twiggy is animated form his Constraint boxes a good portion of the time, we are going to want to see them even though they aren’t actual geometry. When you are in shade mode in your Perspective window, click on the setup box that appears at the top of the window, then put a check in the box that reads SHOW ICONS. Under the heading DISPLAY OPTIMIZATION, click on SHADE. This will allow your scene to stay in shaded mode even when you are changing camera position, or orbiting your scene. The annoying part of this feature is that when you need to select a bone, it gets hidden underneath the shaded geometry. For the most part, the bones are the only things you can select in the scene, so even if you go to select a forearm bone, chances are you’ll select it if you pick in the correct general area.

When you have made the setup changes, save your setup file. Overwrite it if necessary.

The keyboard setup is the most efficient way of speeding up your workflow. When you have to move your mouse pointer out of the arena, to perform a Savekey function, you’re wasting time, and all of those little bits add up to time that you could have used to knock back a brew with the mates at the pub.

So why not simplify your life and create a few keyboard shortcuts, we’ll start with two that I definitely wish you to create.

1. Click on PREFERENCES > KEYBOARD SETUP> LEARN Your mouse pointer will turn into some sort of little shovel icon. You’re in learn mode. We’re going to be creating a shortcut that enables you to save Explicit Translations and Rotations, separate keystrokes.
2. Click on SAVEKEY > OBJECT> EXPLICIT TRANSLATION ALL. A pop up with an image of the keyboard appears. Here is where you tell Softimage what keyboard key you wish to use to save Explicits. I use the Right Shift button, so you may as well use it too. Click on the box for the Right Shift button. If a command is already mapped to that key, you will see a warning line in the bottom right of your pop up. If everything is OK, click OK, otherwise find a new shortcut for Explicit Translations.

Now, lets create a shortcut for keying Rotations. Start from step one above, and follow the same instructions except substituting Rotations for Explicits this time. When the keyboard image pops up again, select the Right Control key for your shortcut. It keeps the two shortcuts close to each other on the keyboard, so that your fingers don’t need to dance in order to animate.

When the Rotation shortcut has been created click on PREFERENCES> KEYBOARD SETUP> SAVE. The keyboard setup file is generated as an .SKS file. Name the file something like %yournameHotkeys.SKS%

If your character is fairly complex, I would highly recommend creating a low resolution model to animate with, not only will the character be lighter and easier to animate the many pieces, it will have less polygons and therefore not slow down the interaction of you with your scene. Low Resolution High resolution swap tutorials are found in the Support section of Softimage.

Save your Tweaked up Twiggy scene. Give the scene the prefix READY_TO_ANIMATE.

This is the Twiggy you will use for the rest of these lessons. All of the settings will be loaded intact each time you need to animate Twiggy. The exceptions are the keyboard setup file and the setup file. They need to be load up every time you call up the scene. If you hate having to do this all the time, you can edit the sisoft.bat file and insert a line that calls up the keyboard file and setup file upon launching Soft.

Your softimage environment is controlled from this file. Each line of the script starts with the word SET. This command sets certain parameters within Softimage. An important Animation Environment setting is neglected in the default version of your environment script. Minimize Soft, and open up a Notepad document, browse for a file named Setenv.bat. You will have to do a search for "all files" as notepad won’t see a .bat file unless you let it know it is there. Open up the file and type the following line of text above the last line in your script:

Save your document when done, overwriting the original setenv.bat

When animating with constraints in Soft, you have to keyframe them before moving on to adjust another object. If the constrained object is not keyed when changes have been made, it will simply pop back to the position it was last keyed in. This line in the script prevents this from happening. Instead of frustrating yourself when you’ve sculpted a nice pose, only to lose it because you forgot to key it, you can now create an entire pose, piece by piece without having to key the pieces until you’re satisfied with the whole pose.

Workflow, workflow, workflow. You’re done cleaning, your character is tidy and shaped up, ready to begin animating. Let’s move on.

Irie.

Animation Preproduction in Softimage 3D was written by Adam Sale. Adam is a Technical Director and co-founder of Joncrow Entertainment. He can be reached at adamsale@home.com.