Posture

 
Result of a Posture layout node

The Posture node allows to modify the posture for affected Entities, by creating a fully animated Maya skeleton that can be animated with the usual Maya tools (Maya manipulators, Maya animation curves, ...).

Add node


Posture node in the Layout Graph Edition panel

Node parameters

Parameters are accessible by double-clicking on the node in the Layout Graph Edition panel:


Scale Range node parameters

Name Name of the node
Active Whether the node is active or not
Operation Mode

Mode of storage for the modified bone's position and orientation:

  • Add: will only store an apply the offset of transformation from the frame data
  • Set: will store and apply the final bone transformation

Using the Posture node

The Posture node allows to edit a posture in cache by creating a fully editable Maya skeleton with the correct cache posture keys. To see the skeleton posture in Maya, simply right click on the Posture node in the layout and click on the "Create Posture Node" contextual menu . When clicked, the node should create a Crowd Cache Posture in the Maya view. The Crowd Cache Posture references the cache and contains a fully editable Maya skeleton.

The Crowd Cache Posture can be deleted at anytime, modifications will be kept stored in the corresponding Layout node.

Changes on the editable Maya skeleton should be immediately seen:

  • as parameters in the layout graph:


A new parameter appears when editing a bone on the Maya skeleton. It contains the name and index of the edited bone, and the type of operation it performs (localOri)


The new parameter is also seen in the Posture parameters, with keyframes if there are. Values can be edited directly here too.

  • applied to the cache posture in the Maya view:

 
Editing the skeleton bone's orientation is immediately visible on the layout cache previz (the orange mesh)

Using Maya's Graph Editor

It's also possible to use the Maya's Graph editor to directly edit the bone's transforms. When doing so, 3 different refresh modes are available in the refresh mode attributes of the crowdCacheRig node


Refresh modes of the Crowd Cache Rig

  • Offline mode

In Offline mode, the rig is never refresh from the Golaem cache. It's more conveniant when fully re-animating the chacater's posture, but not if you simply want to fix some parts of the animations.

  • Live, Current Frame

In this mode, Maya keyframes are only created for frames that already are in the Golaem cache. If the time was never changed since the cache import, chances are that only 1 frame is already cached, so the Graph Editor will only show a single key:


One single key frame

But as frames are loaded into the Golaem cache, they keyframes will automatically be added to the Maya skeleton:


After the timeline was played, most keyframes are now present

  • Live, All frames

In this mode, the Crowd Cache Posture load all the frames from the cache.

Note that forcing to load all cached frames each time there is a modification in the cache can be quite slow, depending on the simulation and the layout nodes.