Exchanging Body Motions, Accessory Animations and Spring Effects

When a character is attached with accessories, the animations of the accessories are able to be included in the MotionPlus file as well. In addition to that, the spring states on the character's extend bones or the accessory animation can also be stored in the MotionPlus format so that you can easily re-apply the file to any standard or non-standard characters.

Exchanging Body Motions, Animated Accessories and the Spring States

1. In iClone, apply a character.
   
2. Attach a bone-skinned accessory to the character.
   Please note that in this case, the bones of the accessory have been applied with Spring Effects in advance via 3DXchange.

   This accessory is a bone-skinned one and the bones are applied with spring effects.

3. Apply motions to the character. Since the extend bones of the character are applied with Spring Effects, these bones (in this case, the tail and the ears) bounce automatically.
   
4. Because the accessory has a spring effects as well, it bounces with the bottom falling through the ground, which is not ideal.
   
5. Turn off the Spring Effect of the accessory.
6. Click the Animation Layer button in the Actor >> Accessories >> Modify Panel >> Animation section. Adjust the accessory by transforming its bones.
   
7. Turn on the Spring Effect at a certain time so the accessory starts to stretch and bounce again along with the movements of the character.
8. Open the Collect Clip track of the character and select a range.
   
9. Right click within the range the select the Add MotionPlus to Library from the menu.
   
10. Activate the Motion, Accessory Data >> Animation and Spring State boxes. Click the OK button to save these items into one single MotionPlus file.
    
11. Apply other characters with the same accessories attached into iClone. This character can be either in this or another new project.
    
12. Drag and drop the save MotionPlus file onto the new characters.
    
13. Alternatively, you can select the new character and click the Animation >> MotionPlus >> Modify Panel >> Import button and load the MotionPlus file.
    
14. You may see that the included motions, as well as the accessory animations and spring states are applied to the new characters.

    Note:

    iClone compares the structures of the character to the MotionPlus, if it finds that the accessories are missing, then it only applies the character's motions and ignores the accessory data included in the MotionPlus. Two factors must be satisfied in order to extract the accessory data from the MotionPlus for applying to the accessory: Identical accessory name and identical parent node. Because iClone auto-renames objects with the same name and surfixed number ,such as XXX(0), when you apply a MotionPlus including accessory data, make sure to manually change the target character's accessory name in order to apply the accessory animations succesfully. The Spring effect is determined and triggered by the spring states (on or off) and MotionPlus thus only includes the state keys instead of baking the spring effect.