Adding additional fcurves to action sources

[dwigfor]

I posted this on xsibase (http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=11;action=display;threadid=47065;start=2) yesterday; maybe people are shying away from malware attacks.... Hopefully someone here can help, in addition to Hirazi

My initial question: Is there a way that I can add these additional rotation fcurves into existing animation action sources?

Hirazi replied that Merge Clips into new Source (http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2013/en_us/userguide/files/actions_BakingClipsintoNewActionSources.htm) might be solution.

I read that help section also and it sounds like merging should work. But do I need to store multiple action sources of the new controller, corresponding to the time of the other action sources? Nervous about doing this so I was hoping for some insight. I thought surely someone's done this before (needed to add an additional controller to action sources.

Perhaps I'm not explaining myself clearly. I created a character key set that contains many different null's position and some rotation values. (I forgot to include one of my controllers) I have already animated all those nulls for 700 frames. My animation consists of many "clips" and "holds"; there are long breaks in between. It seems perfect to do in animation mixer; I have very little experience with it. So I went through and stored character key set fcurves for the different sections of my animation. I set the offset for the start time, kept original animation and added clip to mixer. Question: If I unchecked keep original animation, will that delete the animation from just that section and keep the rest? After I had all the clips loaded into the mixer, I removed all the original animation. So now everything is stored in actions on the animation mixer. It was only after I rearraged one of my clips that I noticed I forgot to include my overall global_SRT null controller; my character spins around and I noticed I couldn't retime that.

So.... first I should add the global_SRT to my character key set.

Next.....

There's very little animation on that null. Like hold for 100 frames, 6 frame animate 360 rotation, hold for 500 frames, 6 frame animate reverse 360 rotation, hold for 100 frames.

Thanks for your help,
-Dave

[Mathaeus]

afaik, 'remove original animation' removes all selected parameters.
Beside merging, easy way is to apply animation back, set everything you want, then store into a new action (select clip in explorer, animation panel> action > apply action). You can edit animation in clips too, but this could be tricky, you need to know names of objects.
Also, you can store animation of just this, 'lost' controller, then just put clip into mixer, aligned with others, in time.
Btw what really is important, once some parameter is controlled by mixer, try to 'fill' all time in mixer for this parameter - 'empty' time in mixer could behave differently in playback and render.

[dwigfor]

Thanks for the reply, Mathaeus.

I decided to use Apply Action/ Store Action. Seems like everything is working okay. First I added the SRT controls from my Global_SRT controller to the character key set. Then applied the actions (first the main action clip, then the other action I made of the global_srt). Then stored a new action.

Thanks for mixer tip - I've put holds in between each clip. I noticed without that, my character would pop pose depending which way I was dragging the timeline.

Now I gotta learn how to export/import action sources from my earlier episodes.

Thanks again,
-Dave