A relationship allows the user to define motion that will be triggered by the changing of a controlling property. In previous Animation Master 8.5 technologies, both Smartskin and Poses were types of relationships. They both are accomplished using relationships now. Smartskin and poses probably will continue to be the most commonly used forms of relationships, but many other uses are now possible.
Think of a Relationship as a little Action file embedded in your model. In each Relationship you can do anything you might do in an Action. You can scale bones, rotate them, move control points, change the character's colors, etc. Relationships are very powerful. They define a controlling
relationship that defines what happens every time the controlling property changes.
In v9, Poses and SmartSkin are not exactly what they used to be. Poses add a new user property to your model which holds a percentage value. You can think of it as a slider value. The value itself however doesn’t do anything. However, by also adding a relationship that is controlled by the new slider value, suddenly the slider value controls anything that was animated in the relationship. Smartskin is just a special relationship. It is controlled by the rotation of a bone. Generally a smartskin controls muscle motion on the cps of the model in the area near the base of the bone. Now it can control other properties of your model as well such as the percentage of a bump map value.
In v9, to create a Pose, right click (or Mac-Equal) on your model's name and select "New, Pose, Percentage." This will open a new Relationship window. Now do whatever you want in the window. You could, for instance, make your character frown. Then close the window.
Open a new Action and make the pose slider panel visible (Alt+4}. You'll see your new Pose, and since you chose "Percentage", you can slide the slider to 100% and watch your character slowly frown. So far this is very similar to how previous versions of AM have handled poses.
In the Project Workspace, return to the Objects Folder and click on the little triangle next to your model's name to expand it's info. See the "User Properties" item at the bottom? Expand that, too. Inside, you'll find your new Pose. Now we'll do something revolutionary. Right-click on the Pose and select "New Relationship." A fresh Relationship window appears. You've just added ANOTHER Relationship to your pose slider! In this one you might decide to make your character's face turn purple, in rage. This brings us to an important difference: When you create a Pose in v9, you are actually creating a new property for your model. And every property can have one or more Relationships. You can keep adding Relationships to your new property. In previous versions of AM, if you created a Pose, you made this thing that looked like an Action Window, and that's where'd you do your stuff. And you couldn't do very much -- you were limited to muscle and bone actions. So why would you want more than one relationship on the same property? Each relationship can be individually turned on or off when it is actually used in your action or choreography. So in a sense you have the ability to create motion in layers by using relationships, much like you might layer reusable actions. For poses this may not seem all that useful, since you can always just choose to not animate a particular slider, or break the two layers of motion into two different sliders. However this is even handier when it comes to relationships like Smartskin where the relationship is based on the rotation of the bone. You often can’t just decide not to rotate a particular bone. Now you are able to turn your Smartskin off
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and on. In fact you can have two or more sets of Smartskin, and turn one on and the rest off. You could use this to create both strained and non- strained Smartskin. You turn the relationship off and on by changing the Enforcement property of the relationship in the instance of the model. The enforcement property of a relationship is actually a multiplier. While the range of motion of a percentage property slider goes from 0 to 100, it may not be linear as it passes through 50%. It can do any crazy thing we like between 0 and 100. The artist manually creates the behavior of the pose slider. However, the enforcement, if not set to 100% will just scale the effect of the relationship up or down linearly. So enforcing a relationship 50% does it half as much, and 200% does it twice as much. I actually expect the enforcement will mostly be ignored except to turn certain relationships off or on.
In addition every relationship has its own lag, which allows it to be controlled by the controlling property based on its value a few frames ago. This value is animatable and can be set separately for each relationship on a property. This may be another reason to break your motion up into multiple relationships. You may want part of the motion to lag, while another does not.
Within your model there is folder called "Relationships." Inside that there is another folder called "User Properties Relationships." Since Poses are a type of "User Properties Relationships," you shall find a folder in here that contains your Pose relationships. To edit each Relationship, just double- click it.
This same paradigm applies to Smartskin. Bluntly: A Smartskin is a Relationship. When you create a Smartskin, you automatically create a subfolder, buried inside the model's "Relationships" folder, which holds the 'skin. New to v9: In the 'skin you may edit changes along any combination X, Y, and Z axes, (no more X-axis Smartskin, Y-axis Smartskin, etc.) Also new to v9 is the power and versatility of Relationships. You can create a character, and create a Smartskin to smooth out a shoulder joint. Later you can add a jacket to your character. To get the folds of the jacket looking right, lock out the CPs of the body's mesh, and then add a new Smartskin! That way there is no danger of accidentally damaging your character's shoulder, as you work to get the jacket looking right. Finally, if you want constraints to be embedded in a Pose, just add them into the appropriate Relationship window, and, in your Action file, crank the pose slider to 100%. New to v9: Angular Limits can be activated by a slider!
Relationships relate properties within the same model, giving you a way to create "Smart Models". This information is saved within the model itself. It is possible to define a relationship directly in the model, in a choreography,
or in an action window. Any way you choose to define it, the results are always stored in the model. When defining a relationship from the model. A private editing window is created, that is essentially an action. The action gives you access to a shortcut of the model. This shows up in the project workspace, which gives you a place to access all the properties of the model that you may wish to animate.
Most relationships will be created during the model setup phase, which means they will be defined in a private editing window created from under the model itself. Being able to define or refine relationships in a scene may be useful after model setup when the animator realizes that the character isn’t holding up well from a particular unforeseen view or situation. Rather than be forced to duplicate this situation in a private editing window, Animation Master allows the artist to refine their relationship right there and then. To do this, find the relationship shortcut under the shortcut to the model. Once the relationship is selected, the Edit Relationship button should be enabled. Pressing it will enter editing relationship mode. However since the relation keyframes created are still stored in the model, this change will persist in all future situations the model encounters. For those familiar with previous versions of the software, the frame number, in a pose or smartskin window, no longer represents the value of the controlling property. Since the controlling property can be a multi-valued quantity like a rotation, a translation or a color, the controlling property itself is the only indication of its value. Where ever the controlling property appears it will be drawn with a red background. You can change this controlling property using the tree, the property page, the timeline, or using a manipulator if one is available. This is equivalent to changing the frame in an 8.5 pose or smartskin window. Changing any other property while in "Define relationship mode" results in that property being controlled by the relationship. In a choreography or an action the purpose of the frame number is obvious. In a private relationship window it is less clear. It may be used to create motion tests for your relationship allowing you to view your relationship in motion by pressing the play button.
In the event that another property already controls the one that controls the currently edited relationship, it too will appear with a lighter red background, and changing will result in a change to the controlling property. So this “Super Property” also becomes like a frame changer in previous versions of the software. This change is not stored as an effect of changing the controlling property. This would create a circularity.
When a relationship is driven by a 1D property, like a percentage slider, the keyframes are stored in a traditional 2 dimensional channel, where the x axis represents the value of the controlling property, and the Y axis represents the value of the property that is being controlled. These