[CAT] Is there a proper way to have multiple animations for the same rig/character?
I've recently been trying to delve into the world of 3D animation using CAT in Max2011, and I've made a custom walk cycle for one of my characters. One question though. Once you have an animation you've made. Is it possible to make a collection of them for one character, then switch between them somehow? I couldn't find any "save/load animation" button, even though you could in older versions of Max using biped BIP/BVH files. I guess a weird workaround would be to create a new "absolute layer for each new animation and then switch between each of them by changing the "absolute weight" to 100% for the corresponding anim, but I dont think that would work properly, especially if each anim uses more than one layer (which they do).
The way I've done it previously (learnt from a tutorial) is to have all your animations in one timeline (EG, forward, strafing and backstepping), but this becomes a bit messy when you want to make a large collection of anims, because your constantly left with the pose of each previous anim, and if you intend to have more than 6 anims, you'll probably end up with a 1000 frame timeline, which would make Max lag to hell . So I guess my main question is: Is there a more intuitive, proper way of managing different animations in the same scene, for the same skeleton?
All the other methods just seem like "workarounds", but not ACTUAL methods.
thanks!
Edit: The reason I need this kind of workflow functionality is because I'm trying to make animations for a game character, exporting them through Actor X for UDK.
The way I've done it previously (learnt from a tutorial) is to have all your animations in one timeline (EG, forward, strafing and backstepping), but this becomes a bit messy when you want to make a large collection of anims, because your constantly left with the pose of each previous anim, and if you intend to have more than 6 anims, you'll probably end up with a 1000 frame timeline, which would make Max lag to hell . So I guess my main question is: Is there a more intuitive, proper way of managing different animations in the same scene, for the same skeleton?
All the other methods just seem like "workarounds", but not ACTUAL methods.
thanks!
Edit: The reason I need this kind of workflow functionality is because I'm trying to make animations for a game character, exporting them through Actor X for UDK.