Space Switcher¶

Date: Jan 31, 2019

Author: Jeremy Ernst

Creating Spaces¶

Creating a space must be done in the unreferenced rig file. View “Setting up Control Spaces” in the Rigging section of the documentation.

Switching Spaces¶

To switch spaces, there are a few ways you can access space switching:

Through the UI¶

To switch spaces through the UI, click on the Space Switcher icon in the animation tools interface:

Here is an in-depth look at each of the elements on the space switcher interface:

The interface for switching spaces.

Field Description

Operation Whether the function the interface performs will be to switch a space or bake a space.

Control This is the control that contains spaces. Start typing in this text field to auto-populate suggestions.

Space This is the list of spaces you can switch to.

Update Matching This section gives functions for updating the matching on space switching if the motion was updated after the space was switched.

Buttons Description

Adds the currently selected control to the “Control:” text field.

Shows a new widget for seeing all valid controls that have space-switching available. Select a control from the list to populate the ‘Control:’ text field.

Select a previously available space-switching key from the current frame.

Matches the previous frame’s space-switching pose.

Matches the next frame’s space-switching pose.

Select the next available space-switching key from the current frame.

To add a control, you have several options available to you. First, you can start typing in the name of a control and the UI will provide auto-complete suggestions:

Auto-completion for typing in a control.

You can also use the list picker button, to bring up a widget that shows all controls with space switching, and select from there.

The control selection list for selecting controls with space-switching setup.

Lastly, you can simply select the control in the viewport or using the control picker, and plug it in using the “use selection” button:

Use the “use selection” button to plug in your currently selected control into the UI.

Note

The space in the combo box will update to show the active space on the current frame when scrubbing the timeline.

Using Hotkeys¶

In the ARTv2 Hotkey Editor, there is a hotkey available for toggling the space on a control. To set this up, open the hotkey editor, found under the ARTv2 menu:

Opens the ARTv2 Hotkey Editor.

In the “Rig Manipulation” section, you will find an entry for “Toggle Spaces on Control”:

Setup the hotkey to toggle spaces on the selected control. Hitting the assigned hotkey will switch to the next available space.

Using the Animation Picker¶

Lastly, if you right-click on a control in the animation picker, the available spaces for that control will appear at the bottom of the menu. Choose one to switch to that space!

Any control that has space switching setup will have their spaces available to switch to in the right-click context menu in the animation control picker.

Space Switch Keys¶

All keyframes set for space switching are done on the control itself. When you switch a space, a “bookmark” key is set on the previous frame in order to ensure there are no pops when the space switches. You will see two keyframes side-by-side any time you switch spaces.

Space switching is happening here on frames 1, 10, and 20, with a “bookmark” key being set on the previous key before each space switch (frames 0, 9, and 19).

The matching is done by setting new values on the control translates and rotates, as you can see in the graph editor:

Each time the space is switched (frames 1, 10, and 20), you can see a jump in the control’s translate and rotate values, which is done to ensure that no pops occur when the space is switched.

Only visible in the graph editor, is the follow attribute (as seen in the first image), which is the actual space switch keyframes (whereas the translate and rotates are the matching keyframes).

All keys are on the control so that re-timing your animation is simple! Just make sure to keep any side-by-side keys together (treat them as one pose) and your space switches won’t get messed up.

Update Matching¶

Sometimes, you may end up adjusting a pose after you’ve done your space switches. Because the control had keys set to ensure there were no pops when matching, those keys may now be invalid if the underlying pose has changed!

In this example, the posing on the spine changed, and now our pistol pops when it switches spaces to the left hand. Notice in the Space Switcher UI how the space changes from holster to l hand? The pistol should not be moving there!

To fix this, you can use the Update Matching tool found in the space switcher UI.

The bottom section contains buttons for browsing to space switching keys and matching the previous or next frame’s pose.

Use the next and previous buttons to browse to the next or previously available space switch key set. Then use the match next or match previous buttons to choose which frame of the key set to update.

In this example, the next frame’s pose is matched to fix the pop introduced by changing the spine motion. Now the pistol smoothly transitions to the left hand space.

Baking Spaces¶

Baking spaces allows you to take a control with animation, and either bake all of the current space-switching down into one space, or bake sections of the animation into different spaces.

Example:

This will bake the gun space into the holster space during the entire animation.

To bake a space, open the space switcher interface, and change the operation to “Bake Space”. Much of the UI remains the same as the Switch Space operation, so if you need a refresher to what the different buttons do, take a look at Switching Spaces Through the UI.

The new parts here are a frame range and a Bake button. Set the control whose space you want to bake, select the space to bake, and enter the frame range that you want the control baked into the given space. In the below example, the weapon_jnt_anim will be baked into the l hand space during frames 53-72. Assuming the control was only in default space previously, this means that it will remain in default space, except during that frame range, in which case, it will be in the left hand space.

This will bake the weapon_jnt_anim control into the left hand space during frames 53-72.