9

904 Glossary
Active T ime S egment
Theactivetimesegmentisthetotalrangeof
frames that you can access using the time slider
(page 3–701).
Bydefault,theactivetimesegmentrunsfrom
frames 0 to 100, but you can set it to any range
from the Time Configuration dialog (page 3–725).
In addition, the active time segment can include
negativeframenumbers,soyoucancreatekeys
before frame 0 and work in negative t ime.
You can change the active time seg ment whenever
you want without affecting the keys you’ve already
created. You might think of it as a window in time,
specifying only that portion of your animation in
which you want to work. Th us, if you have keys
scattered over a r ange of 1000 frames, you can
narrow your active time segment to work on only
frames 200–300 w ithout affecting the keys outside
of the segment.
Activ e/I nacti ve Footsteps
When you first create footsteps for a biped in
Footstep mode (page 2 –988) ,theyareinactive.You
must activate these footsteps using the Create Keys
For Inactive Footsteps button. Active footsteps
have keys to animate the biped. Inactive footsteps
have not been given keys by character studio.
You can make active footsteps inactive by
clicking Deactivate Footsteps.
Both these buttons are on the Footstep Operations
rollout (page 2–990).
In the Track View – Dope Sheet editor, inac tive
footsteps are displayed with a distinctive color to
indicate they are inactive.
If you have upper body animation added to a
biped, and you deact ivate the footsteps, then
re-activateyouwilllosetheexistingupperbody
keys. Use Adapt Locks on the Dynamics and
Adaptation rollout to control which tracks are
affected by the create keys process.
ActiveShade I nitialize a nd Update
ActiveShaderendering(page3–17)is a two-step
process:
•Initialize
•Updateshading
The Initialize Pass
Rendering can be slow. The initialize pass is meant
to take care of the most time-consuming portions
of rendering, to allow the update pass to take place
as quickly as possible. Initialization includes the
following steps:
• Evaluate the scene geometry into meshes.
• Apply space warps.
• Do transformations and clipping.
• Evaluate textures and shade materials.
• Perform optimizations to speed later
processing, such as merging fragments from
thesamesurfacethatareinthesamepixel.
The result of initialization is a buffer. This is a
compressed rendering that, like a G-Buffer (page
3–946), contains the rendering plus additional
information u sed by t he second step, updating.
During the initialize pass, progress is indicated by
a row of pixels (white by default) that traverses the
top edge of the ActiveShade window.
TheUpdateShadingPass
Updating shading takes the buffer created by the
first pass, initialization, and uses information in
that buffer to change the color of pixels when you
make changes to lights and materials in the scene.