Any way to "bake" 3dsmax´s CAT Animation Layers?

SpeCter

Like the title says i´m searching for a way to "bake" CATMotion Layers.
I have different Layers and now i want them keyframed together on one timeline so that for example run goes from 0-29, walk 30-59 and so on, right now i can only enable one layer which gets repeated over the whole timeline eventhough i say that it should start at lets say 30 and end at 59.

Thanks in advance

SpeCter

No luck i guess, if there is still anyone out there knowing a way: Answer please

Silix

hey specter i had your problem a while ago, there are tutorials i believe on the autodesk area site for cat which explain just this.

what your looking for is global weighting which you need to keyframe NOTE: local weighting allows you to define the weights of a layer on specific bones

it helps to enable layer rig coloring mode which colors your rig based on the weighting of the animation layers



while there is ways to bake the animation i don't think this is what you want right now, but if you do collapse layers is right next to the copy and paste layer buttons. AFAIK you also can't bake cat motion using the hierarchy panel bake tools but there is a backwards way to do it using snapshots.

Mark Dygert

1) Is your viewcube meatwad? Hahaha that's awesome.

2) Yep you need to keyframe the Global Weight so that one layer doesn't override the others. It's pretty annoying actually and no where near as friendly or as powerful as the Motion Mixer but you learn to live with it if you use CAT...

Silix

1. haha, yep

2. it is initially unintuitive, especially cause it works differently than original key-framing, but it is nice as it provides simple quick animation blending and i think the real gem is the local weighting allowing you to blend specific portions of the body together.

SpeCter

So i have to animate the global weight from 0-29 for animation 1 and 30-59 for animation 2 for example?
If yes, why the heck is there an option to define start and ending times?

I´m kinda new to to animating like that, i never used motion mixer and when i tried it was laggy as hell.
And with CAT many things are quite easy to do, but like silix said it´s quite unintuitive on some parts.

Another question though, is it possible to save CAT Motion Clips to use them with motion mixer without using the cat layer manager afterwards?

Mark Dygert

I was never able to get CAT and motion mixer to work together, at all.

@Silix the local weighting is nice, I just really like the interface and the flexibility of being able to drag clips around, copy by shift drag, filter layers, trim clips, blend them and set their weights visually.


(Simple Transition Track)

In motion mixer its easy to take a walk cycle and blend that into a run with a transition track. It lets you fluidly adjust the actual transition times without having to manage a few different data points on different layers. Same with scaling and trimming clips, very easy to do, with a nice visual interface without a bunch of micro management of keys.

Silix

@mark lol yea definitely has more control but sometimes you don't need all that

@specter
oo no, i'll use your example, say you have animation 1 that you want from frame 0-29 and animation 2 on frame 30-59

your layers look like this:
100% animation 1
100% animation 2

animation 2 is overriding animation 1 at 100%

you need to keyframe animation 2 global weight to 0% at frame 0, 0% at frame 29, and 100% at frame 30

-from frame 0 to 29 animation 2 will have 0% weight and thus animation 1 will show
-at frame 30 animation 2 will have 100% weight and will now override animation 1
NOTE: since animation 2 is below animation 1, animation 1 does NOT need to be keyframed to 0% weight at frame 30

confusing, yes

think of it as photoshop layers where global weight = opacity, the difference here is where photoshop reads from top to bottom, cat layer read from bottom to top

as simply as i can state it organize your animation in the order that they happen on the timeline, first at top, last at bottom, and increase their weight to 100 as they come in.

i highly recommend watching the autodesk area tutorials on cat animation
http://area.autodesk.com/louis_tutorials/cat_overview_part_2_animating_with_cat

as for you second question AFAIK cat is not directly compatible with biped as biped is as it states a human biped, cat is anything from a dragon to a centipede to a human. if you are using a biped like cat rig there are ways to transfer the animation onto the biped and go from there, i know some but have never actually done them so i don't really know

edit:
just found this screen cap http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

notice how i have mine set to layer rig coloring mode, it shows you exacltly whats going on

SpeCter

That´s exactly what i was looking for, thank you so much(both of you)