Analyze animation in World Space

Activate Anchor Transform in the Create Editable Motion Trails options to isolate the movement of a transform so you can see it in a local context, even in the middle of a walk cycle or a finished animation. This is useful when you need to isolate the action of a single transform relative to the movement of the rest of the rig.

The following scene illustrates an Anchor Transform attached to the ankle of a rig.

Motion trails trace the object's motion through 3D space, but if you activate Anchor Transform, the motion trail illustrates the motion of the object as it appears from the camera's point-of-view.

For example, if a camera is following a character so that the character is always shown framed in the center of the screen, even if the character is moving a long distance in a lateral motion, the motion trail displays as a tight tangle in the center of the screen where the character is appearing. This is because, from the follow camera's perspective, there is very little motion.

Anchor a camera to a same joint to view the joint's motion in context of the larger animation.

Note: You cannot edit the curve created by Anchor Transform.

Visualize camera movement

Anchor Transform lets you sync an object to an animated camera to show the movement of an object relative to the camera. So when a camera is animated in a scene, even if the objects are not animated, the movement of the object in the "film-space" of the camera is displayed.

As you play back the scene, the Motion trail shows how the object moves in the camera view. The following scene illustrates how the motion trails of static objects are displayed with an animated camera.

While this scene illustrates how the camera movement is depicted when the camera is moving and the objects are also animated.

In the following scene, you can see how the Motion trail shows the camera's Point-of-View.

To use Anchor Transform to isolate animation

1. In your scene, create an animated camera.
2. Select an object in your scene, either part of a character rig, or an object and set a key, even if the object is not animated. The object must have at least one keyframe on it, even if it is static, for the Anchor Transform trail to work.
3. Go to Panels > Perspective > <your animated camera name> so you view the scene through the animated camera.
4. Ctrl-click both the object and the current camera in the Outliner and go to Visualize >Create Editable Motion Trails > .
5. Activate the Anchor Transform option and click Create Motion Trail.

   The Motion trail of the object from the camera's point-of-view appears when you play the animation.