Starting animation
 

I'm looking to start doing some animations and have a few questions that I hope someone can answer. These are questions I haven't been able to answer through google searches.

1. Is there an advantage in just keying the individual channels that are animated rather than the whole model?

2. What's the differences/advantages of smooth bind and rough bind. I've messed around with smooth bind, I don't really know anything about rough bind.

3. Is there a way to organise animations, ie. have an animation called "walk" that contains all the keyframes for that animation and that can be inserted into different places on the timeline. Or do you have to copy and paste particular sections of the animation each time.

4. What's the basic workflow for doing animation, I'm just looking for the steps, ie.
1. Bind skin
2. ........ etc...

Hit the tuts ;)

Yeah, you can create only the channels you want to key so you have more precision and control

rigid - stiff characters or machines

Soft for a character that bends - deforms ;) -use mostly

track editor does non-linear animation, cut and paste animations

Thanks Strobe 7, I'll look into the Trax editor, I've figured out the answers to most of the other questions since I made the post.

1. You have to key individual channels. That's kinda just how it works. Please explain a little more what you mean.

2. Smooth bind allows a point to be a member of more than one binding group whilst rigid binding a point can only ever be a member of one group. It's in the docs as far as I can remember.

:)

Alan