Takes Used For Non Linear Animation?

[Gurbo]

Howdy,

From time to time someone always pipes up asking if Houdini has Non Linear Animation capabilities..

I was mucking around with the Take Pane and I noticed I could merge different Takes together. Admittedly it was the translation and rotation of a box.

This may be a bit simplistic but I don't know much about using Takes. Could this be a quick and dirty solution?

Any comments on the Take Manager would be gladly welcomed.

Tar

Gurbo

[stevenong]

Hi Gurbo,

CHOPs is the non-linear solution though it's not packaged as elegantly. For Non-Linear stuff, you will want to use CHOPs.

However, putting my caffeine deprived brain to function a little, yes, takes could be a quick & dirty solution for very simple setups.

One of the major drawbacks is you can't blend between keyframes/channels. In your example, if you have both translation & rotation channels on the box in the main take & you modify, say, the rotation for the second take, takemerge won't blend the rotation channels for you. It will ignore the rotation channel of the second take or you force it to override the main take's rotation channels when merging.

Yep, the lack of help is...erm... not helping so here it is:

help takemerge
takemerge

    USAGE
        takemerge [-f] DESTINATION_TAKE SOURCE_TAKE1 [SOURCE_TAKE2 ...]


        Merges included parameters from one or more source takes into a
        destination take.

    DESCRIPTION
        NOTE: If you specify multiple sources, they are merged in the
        order the occur on the command line.

    OPTIONS
        -f
            Force: if a source take has the same included parameter as
            the destination, the source will overwrite the destination.
            If you do not specify this flag, source files will not
            overwrite data in the destination.

    See also: takemove

Hope the above clear things up. IMHO, CHOPs is the way to go.

Cheers!

steven