Setting Up Your Character’s Hierarchy for Behavior
You can use any character setup in XSI and make it into an actor for Behavior. However, to make the process go more smoothly, you should follow these guidelines for setting up your character’s hierarchy in a way that Behavior understands.
To create a digital actor (humanoid), the character can be a skeleton with or without an envelope and/or a rig. If you include an envelope, make sure that it is as low-resolution as possible so that it can play back quickly when there are multiples of it in Behavior. If you like, you can use box hierarchies to make simple envelopes for the character—see Creating Character Hierarchy Setups from a Guide.
Another solution for a low-resolution envelope in Behavior is to create boxes for the envelope when you generate the Behavior actor (see Generating a Behavior-Ready Actor).
These are the following requirements for what an XSI character needs to be an actor in Behavior:
• The character must be contained within a single model. No other models can be nested within this one.
• The Model must contain only a single null child (GlobalSRT) which is the parent of the whole character. In Behavior, this null is referred to as the root node of the actor.
• The GlobalSRT node must have a single COG child node that contains the main branch of the actor hierarchy that animates and drives enveloping.
The exceptions to this rule are end effectors or envelopes, which can be siblings to the COG node. This means that the XSI character can have end effectors almost anywhere they make sense from a rigging point of view, as long as they are children of the GlobalSRT node.
If you want to keep the envelope or effectors as siblings to the COG node instead of its children, you need to specifically tag the COG node as described in Tagging the COG Node.
• All animation must be removed from the character and stored in action sources. See Preparing the Character’s Animation for Behavior for more information.
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