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lions
03-13-2003, 08:43 AM
Hi Scyalla,

I have this problem. I wonder if you could help me,

I have this Character with which I want to make clips and use the Trax Editor to work with it.

When I want my Character to turn and change direction, I find this Maya restriction that it keeps global and not local orientations.

For example, my character moves along Z axe. Then I want to it turn to the right, and go find the X axe.

So when it turns, Trax thinks that all the infomation provided for X axe, still is for Z axe, because Trax uses global axes for calculations.


Thanks in advance

Best regards,

Lions
matty429
03-23-2003, 09:47 PM
Sounds like a double transform to me.....do you have a root node where you can move the whole skeleton? A good way to test that is if you can scale the skeleton uniformly....You should post a image of your character in the outliner or his character set...It would be easier for people to see whats going on.....
Emergence
03-25-2003, 02:16 AM
Unfortunately as far as I know Maya Trax has no way of dealing with this issue (along with many others).

You have 3 options to work around it:

1.
When using the trax system, animate all of your clips in local space, that is, a cycle will be animated "on the spot" at the origin and moved forward in space using a root node that is not part of the clips. Then you mix and layer and blend all of your clips in the trax editor and move the character around in world space using the root node. You can then bake out the animation from the trax system once your animation is blocked in where you want it and use a script to convert the animation "frame for frame" to a world space puppet that will allow you to pin down the feet and any other world space contacts.

2.
If your animation is fairly basic in terms of direction changes you can animate separate cycles for different directions and blend between them.

3.
Don't use trax because it's a half baked, "Just made it to the feature list then was forgotten", section of Maya.

Though I am still in hope of someone telling me i'm stupidly missing something obvious and Maya Trax can actually do all of the things it should.

Hope this helps some.

-Richard
matty429
03-25-2003, 02:55 AM
Ditto....A revised trax is highest on my list of things to improve

Listen to Emergence...He's helped me with trax before....

Trax is Very limited ..and most the time youre just wasting your time anyways...to try to get cycles to blend properly...

Try ultra-pose....It's different...but it has a lot faster workflow than trax.....

Character sets are great though....
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