6.5 BCS Settings

Here, the settings global to the bcs node are configured.

Click an item on the image to jump to its description.

Freeze Input

If this check box is activated, changes to the input geometry are ignored.

Warning

NEVER touch vertices of the base geometry while Freeze Input is turned on. If you do, you won’t see the changes you make with the vertices. When reloading the scene (or changing the Freeze Input state), chances are you get shocked by what you see, since it will not be what you saw the last time you worked on the scene.

Advanced Info

Moving points of an object with just a bcs in its history will actually move the points of the (invisible) intermediate object (which is the input geometry).

When loading a scene, the bcs node will read the input geometry. Since it didn’t have the most current data as you last saw it, the bcs will have different input geometry data after the reload. Thus, the output will be different.

Hint

To solve this, don’t change anything in the scene. You should disable Freeze Input temporarily.

Now select all vertices of the base geometry and click the CVs (click to show) item in the Channel Box. Select all fields (all rows in all three columns) and set them to 0.

If this didn’t solve it, select the first tweak node in the construction history of the object (before the bcs) and set its envelope to 0.

The last step should be to enable Freeze Input again.

There could be a second case where the Freeze Input option does something unexpected. If the object has changing history before the bcs node. In this case, the changes of the history will be ignored and only visible after a reload. The solution is to not have changing (animated) history before the bcs. Skinning and other history should be added after the bcs.

Warning

Freeze Input should always be checked. Uncheck it only when you know what you’re doing. Unchecking will lead to severe performance decreases even when you just want to move the deformed object or one of the dataPoint geometry objects.

Falloff Axis

This is used for automatically creating the unilateral sub-dataPoints. These are created using a falloff you can specify for each bilateral dataPoint. The falloff axis defines the axis across which the dataPoint should be split. If your object faces in z-direction, set the axis to X. When your object faces in x-direction, use the Z axis as the falloff axis.

Separation Patterns

Specify the separation patterns for creating the left and right weight value names of bilateral weights.

Data Point Snapshots

Specify the settings for the Data Point Snapshots feature. Path is the directory on the hard drive where the jpeg images are stored. You may specify a different directory for different BCS nodes in the same scene or use the same directory for all nodes, even from different scenes.

All images of one particular BCS node start with the Prefix string. They differ only by an appended number, which is the ID of the corresponding dataPoint.

W/H specifies the size in which the images are stored. The image is shrunk with fixed aspect ratio until no dimension is bigger than specified.

Crop to does not affect the stored images. It only controls which part of the images is shown in the GUI.