You can store a snapshot of a character’s current position for any moment in its animation. This snapshot is called a pose. See Create poses. Poses are essentially clips that capture only one frame of a characters animation.
You can access your poses from the Visor, Outliner, or the Library menu in Trax. See What are the Visor, Outliner and Clip Library?. In the Trax Editor, you can scale, cycle, and hold poses just like regular animation clips. See What can you do with animation clips?. However, clip attributes (FrameIn, Frame Out, and so on) do not appear on poses in Trax since poses are only one frame in length by default. To edit pose attributes, you must use the Attribute Editor.
What can you do with poses?
Poses are useful in the following ways:
- You can use poses to compare the various positions of your character as you animate. For example, if you animate a character walking in a circle, you can display the pose of the character at its first step so that you know where it must return to complete its circular route.
- You can create poses for a Blend Shape deformer to create combinations of blendShape sliders. For example, if you define blendShape sliders for all your character’s facial muscles, you can then create poses of the face mouthing various phonemes.
- Lead animators can create various key poses for a lengthy character animation sequence and then give the other animators on their team the creative freedom to animate the character’s motion between the poses.