1. Rig Node

A rig to start simulating your characters muscles.

Node Parameters

Characters

All On | All Off | Toggle Invert - Modifies the enable character attributes. Name - Name of the current character File - current file location on disk. Current Character - Index of the currently visible character

Set up a single character.

Enable - Enable the character Name - Name of a character File - File of a character.

---

Animations

All On | All Off | Toggle Invert - Modifies the enable animation attributes. Animation Index - The currently visible animation Animation Name - Name of the current animation Version - Output Version of the current animation. Rest | Start | End | Inc - Rest frame of the animation, start frame of the animation, end frame of the animation, increment.

Set up a single animation

Enable - controls what work items are generated in TOPs Name - Name of the animation. Alphanumeric characters recommended. (A-Z, 0-9, _, -) Animation File - Find the input Motion Clip Animation File.

Advanced

Frame Increment - Control over how many sub-frames are caches. Max of 1, value of 0.5 means two frames output for every whole frame, value of 0.1 means 10 frames output. Output Version - An independent control for the versioning of the cache to output based on the character and animation.

---

Skip Caches

All skip cache buttons skip individual caches in the TOPs context when outputting work items. This was designed primarily to be used for testing purposes. In the following order the caches will be skipped:

Skip Skeleton Skip Muscle Skip Tissue Collisions Skip Tissue Skip Skin

Ensure you have all your data cached or accessible to skip a previous cache.

It is possible to skip entire cache sections if you feel like it, the bones do not necessarily need to be cached, and you could skip the muscle cache and only use the tissue collision cache.

It’s highly recommended to have either the muscles cached or the tissue collision cached, or both cached ahead of the tissue cache!

These are two separate simulations and the tissue will be faster to simulate and most likely take up less of your computer's memory.

Enabling / Disabling Caches Altogether

To disable a cache altogether you turn off the load from disk toggle button on the associated filecache node, then in the AUTOMATE TOPs network switch the associated switch to the zero input.

---

Cache Management

Cache Directory - Top level directory to save the caches to.

Cache Path - Secondary path to the cache, this should usually be the name. This is probably a bit over complicated.

Version Padding - Number of leading zeros in the version

Frame - Current Frame, this is used to fix subframes Enforce Sub Frames - takes the frame number and sets it to any number of decimal places based on the current frame evaluation. Off - 1230, On - 1230.25 Skeleton Cache Path - Path to output the skeleton. Skeleton Cache Path Exists - Prints the number of frames expected and exists.

Muscle Cache Path - Path to output the muscle. Muscle Cache Path Exists - Prints the number of frames expected and exists.

Tissue Collision Cache Path - Path to output the tissue collisions. Tissue Collision Cache Path Exists - Prints the number of frames expected and exists.

Tissue Cache Path - Path to output the tissue. Tissue Cache Path Exists - Prints the number of frames expected and exists.

Skin Cache Path - Path to output the skin mesh. Skin Cache Path Exists - Prints the number of frames expected and exists.