An illustration of the Motion Trails of static objects display with an animated camera.
Activate Anchor Transform in the Motion Trail Editor 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.
Motion Trails trace the object's motion through 3D space, but you can activate
Anchor Transform to have the
Motion Trails show the motion of the object in "Camera Space", that is, as it appears from the camera's point-of-view. That way, you can anchor a camera to a 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 "camera-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 animation at the top of this page illustrates how the Motion Trails of static objects are displayed with an animated camera. While the following shows how the camera movement is depicted when the camera is moving
and the objects are also animated.
To use Anchor Transform to isolate animation
- In your scene, create an animated camera.
- 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.
- In the Animation menu set (F4), select to open the Motion Trail Editor.
- Choose your camera from the Anchor drop-down menu in the Settings area.
- Select the object in the scene and click
Create Motion Trail.
The Motion Trail of the object from the camera's point-of-view appears when you play the animation.
