Overview of Shape Animation Methods
While there are many different ways of doing shape animation in XSI, you should understand the three basic ways to create shape keys: saving, storing, and selecting shape keys. With each of these methods, you can choose to use the animation mixer or not—it’s up to you how you want to work.
The shape manager provides you with an environment for creating, modifying, and animating shapes. To help you work efficiently, you can immediately see the results of the changes in the shape manager as you make them.
For information on this tool, see Using the Shape Manager.
Selecting shape keys lets you set up a series of similar objects deformed in different ways and then select them as shape keys for either a whole object or a cluster. This is usually done by duplicating the object you want to deform for as many shape keys as you want to create, then deforming each of these duplicates into different “poses”.
If you want to use the animation mixer to animate the shapes’ weights, you can choose to have the shapes automatically applied and shape clips created in the mixer when you’ve finished picking the shape keys.
If you don’t want to use the mixer, you can apply the shape keys to the object or cluster at different frames.
For more information on this technique, see Selecting Shape Keys.
Storing and Applying Shape Keys
Storing and applying shape keys creates (stores) a shape key and immediately applies it to the object at the current frame. This also automatically creates a shape clip for that shape key in the animation mixer.
If you don’t want to use the mixer, saving shape keys is an easy way to work because the shape key is immediately applied to the object as soon as you store it. In addition a custom parameter set containing each shape clip’s weight parameter is automatically created, which means you don’t need to open the mixer to mix shape weights—see Mixing Shape Weights in a Custom Parameter Set.
However, if you want to use the mixer for doing your shape animation, this is an easy way to work because the shape clips are already set up for you. In the mixer, you can then change the order of the shape clips, create transitions between clips, change the weight of the clips, and so on.
You can also simply store a shape key at the current frame, but not apply it to the object. This is a useful way of building up a library of stored shapes that you can later apply to the object as you like.
For more information on this technique, see Storing and Applying Shape Keys.
Using Slider Panels for Shape Weighting
Although the animation mixer calculates all shape animation, you don’t need to actually open it to do shape animation.
When you create shape keys in mixed weight mode (see Choosing a Shape Instance Mode for Shape Clips), a custom parameter set of the weights is created for the object. This set contains proxies of each shape’s weight parameters that are in the mixer.
As well, you can set up your own slider panel for any shape-animated object you like by dragging the animation icon for each shape weight parameter into a custom parameter set to create proxies of these parameters.
See Mixing Shape Weights in a Custom Parameter Set for more information.
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