Does anyone use seperate tracks in Character Studio?

[spacegroo]

I generally avoid Multiple Tracks. Mainly, because I find them an unnecessary headache for the majority of my work when I need to retime animation. However, they do have their advantages in certain instances. One area that CS doesn't do well is having multiple tracks for finger animation. It is very poorly implemented. If you ever have to animate someone doing complex finger animation (like playing piano or something) you may want to avoid Biped fingers, cause the Separate Tracks feature just doesn't help out much there.

Regarding smoothness, though, I think you'll be fine with Single Track animation. Biped uses quaternion controllers for its motion, and they provide a very smooth and intuitive motion. I worked with an animator who insisted on using Separate Tracks and he gained no real advantage to his motion IMO.

One thing to take into consideration is that Lango's tutorial is based on a different system than CS. The animation controls are quite different for both IK and FK. CS uses quaternions, the software he described generally uses Euler rotations (that require a gimbal lock). Hope this helps.

-josh

[neutronrobot]

Thanks for the info. This does help a lot. I also seem to get better results if I don't use separate tracks. I didn't quite follow what you were saying about the fingers though.
If you have to use CS and animate fingers, are you saying separating the tracks doesn't help? If you have to animate complex finger movements in CS, how do you go about it?

Also, do you know if this whole separate tracks thing has been improved in CS 4.1?

[spacegroo]

If you apply Separate Tracks to a Biped arm, you will get the ability to have separate keys for the clavicle, upper arm, forearm, hand, and one finger. Not all your fingers, just one. Therein lies the problem. Imagine trying to animate a character drumming his fingers on a table. In a non-biped setup, you could animate all fingers rising and falling in unison, and then very easily stagger the tracks so that the fingers are offset. Not so in Biped, because only one Animation Track exists for all of your character's fingers. There are solutions to this, but they are all work-arounds to a poorly designed system. CS should be designed so that you can have separate tracks per finger.

As to whether this is fixed in CS 4.1...from what I've read (since I don't have it yet), no, but there are new options that aren't available in previous versions. On the Discreet 3ds Max forum there is a topic that talks about this issue, specifically regarding finger animation: http://support.discreet.com/webboard/wbpx.dll/read?51927,95

-josh

[neutronrobot]

Thanks for the link to the discussion about this.
I'm really amazed that there's still no separate tracks for fingers! That seems like a very basic and important capability. It makes me a bit hesitant to upgrade CS.

[erilaz]

The more I use CS4.1 the more I think they rushed it out. There are too many glitches. Too many under-developed features.

It still beats CS3.x hands down though.:hmm:

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