9

Understanding the Workbench 837
Curve display can help pinpoint troublesome spots
in your animation. You can see where a curve
has problems, usually corresponding to motion
problems in the viewport animation. You mov e
thekeystocompensatefortheproblems.
Unders tanding the Wor k bench
The Workbench is a curve editor customized for
use with character studio.Itprovidesspecialized
tools for selecting and displaying curves, and also
for locating and fixing errors and discontinuities
in motion. It is a visualization tool that allows
you to see and manipulate quaternion f unction
cur ves represented as euler angles. Also you can
seecurvesforthethepositionofabipedbodypart
in any coordinate space.
The Workbench automatically limits selections to
just biped bo dy parts and scene objects related
to that biped. You can analyze these for errors
using a variety of detectors, and fix them using
the provided fixers. You can also apply filters to
perfor m operations on different biped body parts
to generally affect the animation without error
identification.
Function Curve editing for Biped is also available
in the 3ds Max Track View - Curve Editor and in
the expanded track bar, but without the specialized
Work b e nch tool s .
Especially when working with imported motion
capture data, you mig ht find that curve editing is
difficult using the standard 3ds Max tool set. This
isbecauseyoumighthaveakeyoneveryframe,
so curve manipulation becomes cumbersome and
awkward. It is difficult to visually pinpoint where
the trouble spots are located. The Animation
Workbench offers automatic functions to reduce
keys or apply filters to the motion curves to
smooth animation.
The Animation Workbench
See also
Working with the Workbench (page 2–1008)
Animation Workbench (page 2–1012)
Understanding Motion Flow
Motion Flow is a tool that graphically arranges
clips (motion files), flowing from one motion to
the next. You can use a Motion Flow graph to set
up a series of clips with t r ansitions between them,
whichwillmakethebipedperformtheseriesof
motions in sequence.
MotionFlowgraphwithtransitionsbetweenmotionfiles
Yo u c a n a l s o c r e a t e a n e t w o r k o f c l i p s o n t h e
graph, where each clip has a t r ansition to two or
more clips. With this type of graph, you c an tell
character studio to generate the actual motion
sequence for you based on random selection.