M7. Streaming Animation

During interactive playback of events in SGX Director, animation may be visualized in any simultaneously open SGX Studio instance. See Audio-visual playback. In SGX Studio Maya, animation is visualized in the viewport.

In order to bind an event in SGX Director to an instance of SGX Studio Maya, you must:

• Load into Maya the character rig for which the animation is intended.

• Load the character control file for that asset into both SGX Director and SGX Studio.

Once these conditions are met, Studio and Director will automatically connect. When you open an event in Director, the Studio Maya instance (including process ID and character name) should be displayed under the 'Visualizers’ section of the Director Inspector panel. The red eye icon (left) indicates the event is not currently bound to the given visualizer. To enable visualization, click the eye icon; it will turn amber while it connects and then green if successful (right).

Once green, visualization is enabled; you may use the Director event playback controls to preview the animation in Maya. To disable visualization of the event, click the eye icon again and it will turn red.

Note that for real-time animation in Maya, some animation buffering may be required. For this reason, after the eye icon is green, you may need to wait for Maya to complete caching before animation playback will be smooth.

During playback of an event in SGX Director, you can view the state of the muscles in an instance of SGX Studio bound to the event. The muscle sliders are updated whenever playback pauses or the play position is scrubbed.