One of the main enhancements of Release 11 is the addition of a NLA (Non Linear Animation) System. This comprises Animation Layers which MAXON´s website describes " Animation layers allow you to build up a complex movement from individual layers, much like editing an image. You can block out the basic movement on one layer, then refine the motion with secondary animation layered on top. Define the "opacity" of each animation layer to control its influence over the final movement. In fact, you can animate the mix strength of each layer. Animation layers even work with complex hierarchies, allowing you to layer the animation of even the most complex character rigs."
The other main component of the NLA system is Motion Clips. Again best described by MAXON´s website as "Motion Clips provide true non-linear animation functionality by allowing you to group complex keyframe animations from an entire hierarchy into a single clip that can be easily moved, layered or looped. Whether you´re building motions for a character, defining presets animations for motion graphics or designing mechanical simulations, you can easily create a library of motions that can be dragged and dropped like video clips to define the final animation.
CINEMA 4D automatically blends between each motion, or allows you to define the length and curve of the transition. Each clip can easily be looped, scaled or cropped and just as with animation layers, motion clips can be layered with individual mix strength settings for each layer. The animation itself can be easily repositioned in 3D space using CINEMA 4D´s new Pivot Object, making it easy to integrate your motions with one another and place the animation within the 3D environment"
Lastly to support the NLA system is Pivots. Again described by MAXON as "These little helpers come in handy if you need to change the direction of e.g. a walking character, without changing the walkcycle itself. Or if the character walks upon a moving surface (elevator, escalator). In this case only the pivot needs to be animated (move or rotate) and the character follows immediately."
We will now take a closer a look at Animation Layers, Motion Clips and Pivots and try to give you an understanding of how they work and how you can benefit from using them.
Prior to Release 11 we didn´t have Animation Layers. So when you animated an object or loaded an already animated object and wanted to modify the animation you destroyed the original animation unless of course you kept backups of the orginal animation. With R11 and the new NLA system which includes an Animation Layer system we can keep the original animation on a default layer and modify it on other layers. i.e. it´s a non destructive system. If the default animation is very complex it´s a lot easier to tweak the animation by working with animation layers. The default layer can contain thousands of keyframes and the timeline and f-curve views would be extremely complex to work with. Putting the original animation on its own layer and then working on an empty layer without any keyframes is a very efficient way to work. Plus if we mess up we can just delete this layer and start again. The original default layer is there intact.
Below is a screengrab of a simple animation where the original animation was of the cube moving from left to right. I then created an Animation Layer using the 
Add Animation Layer command in the Animation menu. This put the original keyframed animation on the default layer and created an empty layer 1. On layer one I animated the cube going up and down in the Y axis only. The result of the 2 layers combined was like a sine curve. Finally I animated the strength of layer 1 going from 0% to 100% and then back to 0%. The result of the animation is shown by the blue Summary Path which is the new path of the cube.
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Animation Layers |
The Relative / Absolute mode toggle is to toggle from the default Relative mode to Absolute mode. In Relative mode the animation added on layers is mixed with animation on the default layer if the default layer has any animation. Absolute mode however completely overwrites the animation on the default layer (and any other layers).
The Add button creates a new empty animation layer. The Duplicate button creates a copy of the selected layer and the Delete button obviously deletes the selected layer. Similar to merging down layers in a 2D paint program the Collapse button merges down selected layers. Note that to select a layer to be deleted you select and highlight the layer name not select it with the checkmark which is slightly confusing. To select multiple layers Shift or Ctrl click on the names of the layers. The Rename button allows you to rename the selected layer. Something that you will want to do especially after duplciated a layer as both layers will have the same name. I think here the duplicated layer should be assigned a name like "Layer 1 Copy" just like how Photoshop assigns names to duplicated layers.
The Set to Zero button is used to set the offset of animation at the current frame back to zero. In the example image above you can see the summary track of what the cubes path is. The effect of using animation layers is to offset the object or whatever is being animated away from the default animation. Pressing the Set to Zero button is used to set the offset of animation at the current frame back to zero. When you do this a keyframe is added and the offset amount is zero. The documentation says that this is useful if you using Motion Clips and want to blend several clips together and need to zero out the effect of the animation layer at the point where the blend occurs.
This button is the same as it is in the Timeline where is toggles animation on and off for that layer. The icon turns gray when the animation is off. Next to is a little gray icon. This is used to put one or more layers into solo mode. Useful to focus in on the influence of one or two animation layers when you are using multiple animation layers. When enabled the icon looks like this 
I have just mentioned that Animation Layers work by offsetting the animation created on the layers against the original default layer. If you modify the animation on the default layer the animation added on the layers is updated to be offset by the same amount. This can be demonstrated in the following image where the default layer is selected and moving the keyframe at frame 90 upwards. You can see that the summary path has changed to reflect this.
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The Default Animation Layer modified. Updated Summary Track. |
Obviously Animation Layers are a lot more useful when the animation is a bit more complex like when using characters. The following is a short video of me using Animation Layers to modify the head movement on a character that is animated with motion captured data.
Those of you who have been using CINEMA 4D for a few years or more will recall that we had a very basic NLA system using sequences in Release 8 and 9. These essentially were groups of keyframes on a particular track. It was clunky but it did allow you adjust your animations by moving the sequences around and editing them. Sequences were done away with in R10 and it was pretty obvious that with R10 the Timeline was work in progress as there was no way for example to loop an animation for a fixed number of loops. You could however loop it indefinitely. In 10.5 the Timeline was worked on some more and was a lot more polished than the R10 version. With R11 MAXON has more or less completed the total rewrite of the animation system although a few bugs need fixing.
We´ve already covered Animation Layers above. Motion Clips are the other major part of the NLA system. Motion Clips provide NLA capability by allowing you to group complex keyframe animations on an entire hierarchy into a single clip that can be easily moved, layered over other motion clips or looped. Let´s have a look at an example of using Motion Clips. The cool thing with Motion Clips is that they can be used on other objects even if the other object has a complex hierarchy like a rigged character. So long as the source object and the target object have similar hierarchies you can use the animation from one object to bring another object to life. This is what I´ll do here. For this example I´m using Plastic Man that came with R9. This is a simple rigged character in the form of a T-Pose. Accompanying Plastic Man were some motiion captured files that were originally in FBX format.
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Plastic Man - T-Pose |
The first thing that I need to do is to create an empty Motion Layer for Plastic Man. This is done by selecting Plastic Man and selecting the 
Add Empty Motion Layer command from the Animation menu. Next I need to bring in some animation so I´ll merge a file with some motion capture applied to rig with my current scene. This is just some bones animated to run a couple of steps. This time after merging the scenes I need to create a Motion Clip from the animated bones. This is done by selecting the object in the Object Manager and then from the Animation menu selecting the Add Motion Clip command 
. Once you do this, the following dialog box appears. I disabled the Parameter option and left the other settings at their defaults.
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Add Motion Clip Options |
It´s now time to head into the Timeline and select the new Motion Mode view. You can do this by either selecting an Animation layout or selecting the Timeline from the Window menu. You then click on the Motion Mode view icon. The similar looking icon to the right toggles visibility of the Motion Sources in the left hand panel.
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Motion Mode Icon |
Alternatively you can click on the Motions tag that is applied to your object and from the Attributes Manager click on the Open in Timeline button. Here are the Motion tag settings.
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Motion Tag Settings |
Once in the Timeline you can drag and drop the Motion Clip created for the animated bones into your empty motion layer on Plastic Man. Here is the result. Plastic Man is now alive and takes on the animation from the animated rig. Click on the image for the full size view.
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Motion Clip applied to Plastic Man |
This is just the beginning of what we can do with Motion Clips. Things that we can do include copying the clip and moving copies to the right or enabling loops thus looping the animation. If the animation is too slow or too fast then it´s just a matter of scaling the size of the clip. One option is to have Relative Loops. With this option the run cycle carries on from where the last one finishes. The following animation demonstrates the Relative Loop option where one version of Plastic Man has this option enabled and the other doesn´t. Both are set to 4 loops.
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Click here or on the image to view animation (QT 813kb h.264) |
It´s all very well making your object or character move or run in a straight line but what if we want Plastic Man to run around corners? No problem. This is where Pivot Objects come into play. These are like a special null object that you place in your scene and they define a point in space where you want the object to pivot. They can be animated to move and rotate and you can have more than one of them. Here´s the above Relative Loop animation of Plastic Man but this time I added in a pivot object and animated it to move and rotate so that Plastic Man could run around a corner. You should be able to see that the figure leans into the corner.
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Click here or on the image to view animation (QT 1.2mb h.264) |
I think getting good results when using Pivot Objects will take some practice especially when used with character animation. So far I´ve only shown the use of one Motion Clip. Naturally you can have more than one and then can be blended together so that you get a smooth transition from one clip to the next. In most cases you will need to use a pivot object otherwise the object will slip backwards. Let´s have a look at an animation where I´ve blended 2 Motion Clips together. In this case the pivot obeject didn´t need to be animated but getting it positioned took a little bit of playing around. Click on the image on the left for the full size screen grab and click on the image on the right for the animation.
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Click on the image to view full size image. |
Click here or on the image to view animation (QT 1.3mb h.264) |
Although I have demonstrated some of the capabilities of Motion Clips using motion captured data you can use motion Clips on simple objects and for simple animations. The Cafe has a tutorial on using Motion Clips to Animate a Newton´s Cradle. You can download the tutorial here. The orginal keyframed animation only contained one cycle for each ball. I created Motion Clips for each ball and then looped them. Lastly the strength of the Motion Clip layer is animated going from 100% down to 0%. The effect is the swinging balls swing in ever decreasing amounts until there is no movement left. Below is the animation from the tutorial.
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Click here or on the image to view animation (QT 2.2mb h.264) |
Not perfect but not bad for what is essentially a looped animation. There´s still more things that you can do with Motion Clips. They can be cut although I found when you cut them you needed to use pivot objects otherwise the object jumped back to the postion of the first keyframe. Motion Clips can also be stacked in layers. You can for example have the leg movement from one Motion Clip and the arm movement from another Motion Clip.
One thing to be aware of is that Animation Layers and Motion Clips can´t be combined. Motion Clips have their own layer system anyway.
MAXON has done an excellent job with Animation Layers. They are very easy to use and make modifying animations a lot easier than before. Motion Clips are also very good but they feel a bit like work in progress as there are some bugs that make working with them problematic and MAXON has yet to address them at the time of writing this section of the review (January 2009). One thing that will need addressing in a future version is viewport animation playback speed. Even in fairly modest scenes playback speed i.e. frames per second usually doesn´t match the project frames per second.