Character Animation

[raffael3d]

XSI is probably the best software for character animation.
everything you can be animated, you have an amazing animation mixer and a great f-curve editor.
besides the ease of the setups you can use tools like Synotpics to animate your objects.

[Nurb'd]

How is the clip handling? What if I want to split a clip in two?

I had heard you can drag and drop clips right onto other characters.. true?

So editing function curves is no problem then? Can you filter curve visibility?

[wmendez]

Softimage has always had the best character animation tools and with XSI it has kept the reputation.

Character rigs are the easiest thing to setup

Clips can be split until your heart contents and can be joined into one compound clip.

practically everything in XSI is drag and drop

By filtering curve visability do you mean isolating it? if so yes and it also shows the previous state of the curve (semi transparent) before you edited it so if you made a mistake you can revert back to the original curve.

[Nurb'd]

:drool:


CA was the only thing I was concerned about in the transistion

by the way can you tell me how good the shipping doc/manuals are? and would you recommend 1 book/vid over all others?

thanks for the time

[wmendez]

Manuals are very good and hard to beleive that some people don't even read them. If your just getting into XSI I would recommend the following video

http://www.cineframe.com/fundamentals/index.htm

Anthony Rossano's Illuminated Character is good as well

http://www.mesmer.com/books/xsicharacter.html

[Nurb'd]

wmendez thank you very much

[ThE_JacO]

Since my opinion, ad previously stated in another thread, would be considered biased from most i won't make any comparisons (for the sake of peace); maybe tho you could find a list of some AM functions useful:

Anything that can be animated can be put into a clip (and back raw onto the object) without any presetting.

Any MIX of parameters can be put in a clip.

Clip contents can be edited at any time like if they were normal Fcurves.

you can have the same parameter of the same object contained into multiple clips that will just blend together at any time, also

transition tools like if you were using anormal NLE app.
Not to mention bridging that performs actual motion analysis and compensation.

you can turn ON or OFF any contribution of a clip to any parameter you wish non destructively, it's just a tagbox no data is lost or moved.

you can have multiple clips merged into a compound, the beauty here is that a compound is a simple container, this means you can enter the container and access the original clips.
this also allows for creating a branch structure in your mixer for easier management and navigability.

Compound are dealt with like if they were normal clips, therefore can be scaled moved or whatever and the content original info are preserved, only modified by the superset the compound is.

on top of clips you can apply effects of any kind that multiply, modify link etc. the Fcurves inside it (something like having a clip with a full walk and then tell just to the Ztranslation to move forward for every cycle)

clips can be offset, moved, scaled, mixed, trimmed, and even WARPED.

clip warp allows anything from retiming to flipping without influencing the actual source, instance or original Fcurves.

Clips can be merged into a single clip

there are functions o equalize clips that will split (without destroying the original one) several Fcurves into several clips the contribution of wich you can later on animate, a set of sliders is also created at this time for easier manipulation.

you can find cycles in a clip.

motion tools...

and a lot more that doesn't come to my mind atm.

Does this sound like the mixer is capable enough ? :)
and that's JUST the mixer, don't get me into functions like quickstretch (actually working) or other things.

Hope this helped :)

[Nurb'd]

that is sick

[streamzin]

I have ever used 3d max, then I used maya, now I am using XSI, I am not a good user yet, but I can feel that XSI's CA is quite good, however as a whole package, maybe maya is better than XSI in other aspects¬

[ggg]

that's specific : )

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