ANIMATION

Fast, flexible animation is the heart of XSI. Streamlined workflows make it easy to pose and keyframe highly detailed characters. You get more keying done while watching your character in the viewports, without having to open another editor.

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Real-time playback means you can see what you’re doing without waiting for animation previews. A clean, responsive curve editor and dopesheet make it easy to manipulate animation. Easy animation layering and mixing simplify the process of breaking animation into parts and moving it around.

Animate Almost Everything in XSI

You can animate every scene element and most of their parameters — in effect, if a parameter exists on a property page, it can probably be animated.

Animatable parameters fall into four categories:

• Motion: Probably the most common form of animation, this involves displacing an object from one point to another, or rotating it.
• Geometry: You can animate an object’s structure by changing values such as U and V subdivision, radius, length, or scale. You can also use surface deformations and skeletons to bend, twist, and contort your object.
• Appearance: Material, textures, visibility, and transparency are just some of the parameters controlling appearance that can be changed over time.

The Timeline

In addition to the standard keyframing and playback controls, the XSI Timeline offers powerful tools for working with your animation. So-called “timeline dopesheet” functionality works in tandem with the keying panel to let you cut, copy, paste, scale, ripple, and merge, keyframes directly on the timeline, and block out animation quickly. Filtering options control what types of keys are displayed. To help with lip-syncing, you can display audo waveforms on the timeline as well. An optional time range slider lets you quickly display and shift between ranges of frames on the global timeline so you can work more precisely.

In XSI, you can cut, copy, paste, merge, scale, ripple and replace keys directly on the timeline for fast retiming and blocking out of animation. Download video - right-click and save as...

Learn the basics of keyframing and playing back your animation in the timeline. Download video - right-click and save as...

Keying Tools

Keying Panel

The keying panel is a one-stop-shop for setting and editing parameters to keyframe. You can define, expose or key multiple parameters at once. By only displaying the parameters that you need to key, the keying panel makes the keying process more efficient, and helps eliminate mistakes.

The keying panel helps you animate faster by letting you display and key only the parameters you need. Download video - right-click and save as...

Character Key Sets

Character Key Sets let you easily set keyframes on predefined sets of parameters for a faster animation workflow. Creating a key set means you don’t need to select an object first to key its parameters—just press K and whatever is in the current character key set is keyed.

Dope Sheet

Similar to a cell animator’s dopesheet, the XSI dopesheet shows your entire animated sequence, frame by frame, and helps you analyze its overall motion and timing. The dopesheet is ideal for quickly blocking out and retiming animation.

FCurve Editor

The XSI animation editor gives you a complete set of tools for working with function curves. In addition to standard fcurve manipulation tools, the animation editor provides a High Level Editing mode that lets you manipulate high-density curves (from motion capture, for example) using a simplified “sculpting” curve, and a snapshot mode that lets you preserve a curve’s original shape while your editing it, so you don’t have to commit to your changes until you’re satisfied with the result.

Take a look at XSI's function curve editor, including snapshot curves and a High Level Editing mode for dense curves. Download video - right-click and save as...

Animation Layering

Animation layers give you an interactive and non-destructive way to add keyframes on top of existing animation, and break individual motions into primary and secondary animations without having to commit to changes or edits up front. Layers make it easy to work with motion capture data without wading through highly dense FCurves.

Animation layers are great for working with motion capture, allowing you to make non-destructive changes on top of the original animation without having to touch the dense mocap data. Download video - right-click and save as...

Animation Mixing - True non-Linear Animation

The mixer is the heart of XSI’s animation power. By packaging complex animation into clips that you can mix together in an intuitive editing interface, the mixer lets you create libraries of actions that you can combine into complete animations without having to go back to the underlying keyframes or fcurves.

You can mix anything from animation clips, composite clips, constraints, and expressions, to shapes, and textures. Even sync audio. Like other XSI tools, the mixer is non-destructive, so the underlying animation stays intact, but instantly reflects any changes you make to it.

The mixer comes complete with tools to easily handle motion capture sequences, including motion matching, marker placement, offsets, and frequency-based transitions. You can transition a walk to a run without slipping feet, or link one character’s animation to another’s in just a few clicks.

From pre-viz through to polished animation the mixer gives you high-level control with low-level precision.

Animation mixer, part 1: learn the basics of packaging animation into clips that you can use in the mixer. Download video - right-click and save as...

Animation mixer, part 2: learn how to blend between animation clips, and package multiple clips into "compounds." Download video - right-click and save as...

Animation mixer, part 3: Learn more about how mixer animation affects objects parented in hierarchies, and find out how to get fcurves back from mixer sources. Download video - right-click and save as...

Shape Manager

The XSI shape manager is a dedicated environment for creating, managing, and animating a library of shapes. At any time you can edit your original base shapes, create hybrid-blended shapes, or view shapes with additional deformers such as envelopes. With the shape manager there is no need to create separate geometry for each shape (“morph targets”).

The XSI shape manager is a dedicated environment for creating, managing, and animating a library of shapes. Download video - right-click and save as...

Audio Syncing Tools

If you need to sync audio tracks with your animation, XSI provides numerous ways to see your audio directly in the animation tools. You can display audio waveforms in the timeline, fcurve editor, and animation mixer; set audio markers for display in the fcurve editor and animation mixer, and even load audio clips into the animation mixer. Flexible scrubbing options let you control how your audio plays back when you drag the timeline playback cursor.