14.1 Manually creating a posture sequence

A sequence can be created manually by changing the model's posture and successively recording the body positions relevant to the activity. The user can edit the posture with the controls available for each body segment and, once the desired position has been defined, record it at the current point on the timeline.

A posture is recorded using the posture record button, identified by a red dot in the editing panel, as shown in Figure 69. Pressing this button stores the model's current posture at the selected animation time.

Each recorded posture appears on the timeline as a small rectangle representing a keyframe (Figure 70). These keyframes indicate the points in time at which the user has explicitly defined a posture. The animation is built from the succession of these keyframes and the duration separating them.

To create an animation manually, the general procedure is to move to a point on the timeline, change the model's posture, record the posture, move to another point, change the model again, and record a new posture. By repeating this process, the user can build a sequence representing the main phases of the activity.

Keyframes created manually by the user, except for the initial one, can be moved along the timeline to adjust when each posture occurs. Keyframes obtained through automatic capture retain their sampling times and cannot be moved individually from the timeline. Both types can be deleted when they are no longer needed or when the animation's temporal structure must be changed. The sequence is therefore not irreversibly fixed when it is created; it can be edited later to improve its correspondence with the actual task.