Animation Targets
Animation targets are set by the Speech Graphics team as part of the character setup service. However you can edit them in SGX Studio.
The very first step in the character setup process is to select the rig parameters that Speech Graphics software will control. These are called the animation targets. Normally you will simply provide a list of these to character setup services.
In a Maya rig, animation targets will be attributes on scene nodes. These may include:
weights on blendshape nodes
translation, rotation, or scale attributes on joints or any other transform nodes
custom attributes on any node
Animation targets may thus support any kind of rigging, whether using blendshapes, bones/joints, some higher-level animator UI handles, or any mixture of these.
Once animation targets are set, we may proceed to define the neutral pose and muscle poses of the character in terms of displacements of those parameters.
Reference pose
The animation targets must be selected while the character is in the reference pose, which is the original pose of the character in the scene. The reference pose values for the animation targets are recorded in the character control file at the same time that the animation targets are selected. It is important to have the right reference pose because it helps determine displacements for muscle definitions, and is the basis for absolute animation.
Transforms
Note that bones and other transforms have 9 attributes that can be targetted:
translation x
translation y
translation z
rotation x
rotation y
rotation z
scale x
scale y
scale z
You may choose some subset of these 9 attributes to target. However, note the following rule: if the given targets include any components of rotation or scale, then all 9 components of the transform will automatically be included in the final target set.
Changes to animation targets
Any changes to the deformational effects of your rig’s animation targets – such as bone skinning changes – may require adjustments to the muscle poses or neutral pose.
Furthermore, any changes to the names of the animation targets in the scene may cause the muscles using them to stop working properly because the targets are not found. If naming changes occur, you can can remap animation targets in SGX Studio, or contact our support staff to make the change for you.
Similiarly, any discrepancies in animation targets between the rig on which the character was set up, and the rig that the animation is being applied to, can cause problems with the animation of muscles using those targets. Contact our support staff if you have different versions of the rig for different purposes.
Animation levels
For more complex rigs with animator-friendly interfaces, there may be two levels of targets: high-level UI controls and low-level controls (such as bones and blendshapes), where the latter are driven by the former. In SGX these two sets of targets are called animation levels – namely, the control level, and the baked level. The animation targets at the baked level receive their values via flow of information from the control level. In typical use cases, the control level is better suited for manually setting up the muscle poses, but the baked level is used for animation in the game engine.
SGX allows you to define both animation levels in the same character control file by simply selecting two sets of animation targets. Muscles can then be baked, meaning the muscle poses defined on the control level are automatically re-created on the baked level.
