8

1004 Glossary
and choose Controller Types from the list). The
controller names appear beside the tracks to which
they’re assigned.
You can assign different controllers to the t racks,
affecting the way they respond. The Bezier
Controller, assigned by default to all the Position
tracks,letsyoumoveobjectsusingtheSelect
and Move transform tool, and converts those
movements i nto Bezier splines. You ca n adjust the
splinesinFunctionCurveeditingmode.
Animation Layers
Whenyouanimateabiped,youcanaddlayersof
animation above the original biped animation.
This is a powerful way of making global changes
to your character animation. For example, when
youaddalayerandrotatethespineforwardatany
frame, a run c ycle becomes a crouched run. The
original biped motion is kept intact and can be
viewed by switching back to the original layer.
Layers can be viewed individually or as a
composite of all the animation in all the layers.
Layers behave like a freeform animation; the biped
can adopt any position.
Layers allow you to easily adjust raw
motion-capture data, which contains keys
at every frame. You do this by adding a layer and
keyframing the biped.
Layer controls are on the
Layers rollout (page
2–827)
.
Applied IK
A t ype of inverse kinematics where one or more
parts of the IK structure follows another animated
object exactly. After the scene is set up, Applied
IK generates transform keys for every object in
the I K chain.
See
Animating with Applied IK (page 2–464) .
Ar ea Li ghts (menta l r ay R en derer )
Area lights are a feature of the mental ray renderer.
Instead of emitting light from a point source, they
emit light from a broader area around the source.
Area lights create soft-edged shadows. This can
help improve the realism of your rendering.
Scene rendered with area light turned off
Shadows are ray-traced.
The yellow cube indicates the light’s location.
Scene rendered with area light turned on, showing soft
shadows
The light in this rendering is a 2D (spot) area light.