A question regarding efficiency. Importing an animated FBX Character, most often only the rotate channels are animated ( seldom translate, except the root ), scale should anyway not be animated at all. This results in lot of “empty” channels in an imported FBX Take Comp.
Isn’t there an overhead in still blending those unused channels ? And if there is, how to optimize it ?
Cheers, searching for the Pivot of my Soul, PP !!!
What do you mean by empty channels? Channels that don’t change values over the entire clip?
No, I mean Channels that don’t have keyframes at all. There are a lot of those in Maya/Motionbuilder so I assume it will be the same when importing a take into Touch. When I middleclick a Take I see all the Channels, including these empty ones. blending, lets say, 250 Channels, while only 100 channels do influence the animation seems needless.
Cheers, searching for the Pivot of my Soul, PP !!!
Hi Peter,
Yes, fewer channels will be faster to cross dissolve and faster to load.
The best way to handle the empty channels is to not export them in the first place if possible. And export only the frame range you need in Touch.
Otherwise, you can use a select CHOP to grab just the channels you need (r[xyz], etc.), then right click on the select CHOP holding the active animation channels and “save CHOP channels”, then use the resulting file as your source animation clips. You can further optimize if you have a long sequence by using the trim CHOP to get individual clips of animation.
If you need some additional pointers post a file and I’ll show you what I mean.
Jeff
Cool, thx, please take the file from this Thread: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2107
I think you worked on it already ( the blue vegetarian dragon ).
The channels in question get created from the FBX importer, so I don’t have the control which Channel should get created, and which not. Now I know, that I scale has no animation, so I should get rid of those channels before blending, right. Same is true for most of the translate, but as a demo removing the scales should be enough.
You suggest using a select CHOP, this needs to be done per Take, and blended, right ? And then when feeding the blend into the out CHOP, the right channels will find their way to the right Character Attributes ?
Cheers, searching for the Pivot of my Soul, PP !!!
Hi Peter,
OK, here’s an example for you. It shows how to select individual channels and run a trim on the sequence. I saved out each of the versions by right clicking on the select and trim CHOPS, then selecting “save CHOP Channels…” and saving into the Chan folder. Once you have all the takes processed/trimmed/etc. then just load the final takes and turn off or delete the original clip, that will speed up loading.
Yes, you will need to process each take appropriately, blending and exporting should still work fine.
Let me know if you have questions,
Jeff
dragon.zip (342 KB)
Thank you very much, checking out … 
Cheers, searching for the Pivot of my Soul, PP !!!