Viewing all channels for a particular group

[chikega]

Enable "Autoselect" under Setup > Groups. :)

[heynewt]

Thanks,

Well, that got me half-way there.

Here's the very simple thing I'm trying to do. Now that I have them all showing up and in the graph editor - if I was in LW, then then I could simply draw a box around all the keyframes at that time point and ALL the keyframes for all the channels at that point would be selected.

In Messiah, I still have to go to each bone and highlight it to select its particular keyframe at that point in time. I want to select ALL the keyframes in my group's channels at a certain point and change them ALL to linear.

Robert

Enable "Autoselect" under Setup > Groups. :)

[chikega]

Hey heynewt (that sounded funny),

Under Motion Graph Basics in the help file, you should see this paragraph:

Multiple Curve Editing:
To make more than one channel appear in the Motion Graph, open the item's channels in the Item List and multi-select the channels that you want to have appear in the Motion Graph (SHIFT select or CTRL select). If you want, you can have channels appear in the Motion Graph but not be editable. To do that, turn off the Multi-Channel Editing icon in the Item List (see image below). If this icon is on, then any time this channel is selected, even if it is not the highlighted-yellow current channel, it will be editable. The image below shows some channels with the icon on (editable) and some with it off (not editable).

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/multichanneledit.gif


Cool Tip: If you have some channels that you want to always appear together and be editable, make them a Group (click here (interface_setup_Groups.htm) for info) and turn on the Multi-Channel Editing icon for them. In the Group, turn on Auto-Select. So what will happen is that any time you select one of those channels, all of them will become selected (because of Auto-Select) and they will all be visible and editable in the Motion Graph (because of the Multi-Channel Editing icon).

Important Note For Longtime messiah users: In versions of messiah prior to messiah:animate 4.5 and messiah:studio 2, the Multi-Channel Editing icons were off by default. Now they are on by default. They still work the same way, but people preferred them to default to on.

[heynewt]

Gary,

Thanks for being patient with me. Yes, I've read that part in the manual many times. That's where my frustration comes. It's not working the way the manual says. I'll try to explain again my problem.

1. If I simply multi-select a few channels from an object in the list, then everything works fine, the way it's supposed to in my graph editor.

2. If I multi-select a few channels from an object or multiple objects, AND THEN I CREATE A GROUP of those objects, and I select "Auto-Select" in the Group block in the Setup Tab. Ok, fine, then I go into the graph editor and make sure my Group is selected in that box in the upper left corner. Okay fine so far. I can SEE all of my splines. No problem so far. But if there are 2 keyframes from 2 different channels which are overlapping each other, there is NO WAY I can select both of them at the same time. I have to go up to the list and highlight individually the bones I want to select in order to, say, change the tension on all the bones. I hope that makes sense.

Again, thanks for pointing that stuff out to me, it's just that it's not working like the manual says for me, and that's my frustration.

Robert


Hey heynewt (that sounded funny),

Under Motion Graph Basics in the help file, you should see this paragraph:

Multiple Curve Editing:
To make more than one channel appear in the Motion Graph, open the item's channels in the Item List and multi-select the channels that you want to have appear in the Motion Graph (SHIFT select or CTRL select). If you want, you can have channels appear in the Motion Graph but not be editable. To do that, turn off the Multi-Channel Editing icon in the Item List (see image below). If this icon is on, then any time this channel is selected, even if it is not the highlighted-yellow current channel, it will be editable. The image below shows some channels with the icon on (editable) and some with it off (not editable).


http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/multichanneledit.gif







Cool Tip: If you have some channels that you want to always appear together and be editable, make them a Group (click here (http://interface_setup_groups.htm/) for info) and turn on the Multi-Channel Editing icon for them. In the Group, turn on Auto-Select. So what will happen is that any time you select one of those channels, all of them will become selected (because of Auto-Select) and they will all be visible and editable in the Motion Graph (because of the Multi-Channel Editing icon).


Important Note For Longtime messiah users: In versions of messiah prior to messiah:animate 4.5 and messiah:studio 2, the Multi-Channel Editing icons were off by default. Now they are on by default. They still work the same way, but people preferred them to default to on.

[chikega]

heynewt, not a problem. I was hoping one of the more experienced animators would have chimed in by now. Since my strength is not so much in the animation portion of messiah but rather the render portion. I've tried to replicate your problem ... but, it seems to be working for me. Did you add the individual channels to the group list?

To make sure we're on the same page when creating groups - you have the option to add individual channels to the group list, not just the objects themselves. Once you have this setup, you'll be able to multi-select by clicking a dragging a box around the channels.

By the way, you can change the Tension interactively by holding down the Ctrl key while clicking and dragging. If two different channels have different tension amounts the change will be additive to both channels. If you wanted an absolute change -say you wanted both channels to be .5, then you would type .5 into the field under the Spline folder. :)

[dobermunk]

You're right. I also banged my head against the wall with this.
Intuitively, you should be able to grab both, but in effect you can't. I thought it would have something to do with the "e" button for double object editing, but that didn't work either.

:-(

[heynewt]

Good, I'm glad I'm not going crazy.

I'm going to move this to a new thread to see if I can get an answer to it. It's that important to me.

Robert

[dobermunk]

Cool Tip: If you have some channels that you want to always appear together and be editable, make them a Group (click here (interface_setup_Groups.htm) for info) and turn on the Multi-Channel Editing icon for them. In the Group, turn on Auto-Select. So what will happen is that any time you select one of those channels, all of them will become selected (because of Auto-Select) and they will all be visible and editable in the Motion Graph (because of the Multi-Channel Editing icon).

Dug this out of the docs. Just digging into this a bit deeper myself.
It works well for the same channels of the two objects. You want to get two channels of the same object moving together right?

[heynewt]

Hi Dobermunk,

Yes, check out the new thread below. I think it's something screwy with my own Messiah setup. I was able to create a situation where I got it to work just like the manual says with a null and a couple of bones in a test situation, but my real scene still isn't right.

Now I'm having a problem getting item filtering to work in any new scene I create.

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?p=1771175&posted=1#post1771175

See the end of that thread.

Robert


Cool Tip: If you have some channels that you want to always appear together and be editable, make them a Group (click here (http://interface_setup_groups.htm/) for info) and turn on the Multi-Channel Editing icon for them. In the Group, turn on Auto-Select. So what will happen is that any time you select one of those channels, all of them will become selected (because of Auto-Select) and they will all be visible and editable in the Motion Graph (because of the Multi-Channel Editing icon).

Dug this out of the docs. Just digging into this a bit deeper myself.
It works well for the same channels of the two objects. You want to get two channels of the same object moving together right?

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