Using The Trax Editor

Once the four animations I was doing for the group animation had been finished, the next task was to prepare them to be used for the final animation. To do this, all four of the animations needed to be transferred onto a single maya file, so that the maya files of each of the four characters could be put together in the same scene.

To do this, the Trax editor was used to clip off the animations from the controllers, making it easy to order and duplicate each separate animation. Unfortunately, I did encounter a few problems during this process. The first issue I had was to do with loading one animations clip onto another animation. At first I tried importing the maya binary file of one animation onto the Trax editor of another animation file. Unfortunately, when I did this the animation wouldn't load at all. Eventually I discovered that this issue could be worked around by instead exporting just the clip itself from the Trax editor and then importing this.

While this got around the issue of importing animations into other character files it did bring up another issue. Instead of the second animation importing onto the same rig as the first one, it instead created a second character rig on top. Obviously this wasn't usable at all. After testing out a few different things, I worked out that to fix the issue, all of the exact same controllers had to be selected each time a character set was created. When this was done correctly it allowed for multiple animations clip to be imported onto a single character rig.

The final issue I found when using the Trax editor was that when multiple animations were imported onto one rig, the positions of some parts of the body in one animation were overwritten by the animations from another. It turned out that this issue was caused when controllers were used in one animation but not in another. The fix for this was to ensure that all controllers which weren't being used but were used on other animations were keyframed at the beginning and end of each clip. Thankfully this fixed the issue with positions being overwritten and meant that I was able to finish putting all 4 of my animations onto a single file. This file was then taken, and the final animation was put together by Callum with the box fort being created by Steph.

Here is the Trax editor for the file which contains all 4 of my animations on the single rig.