A scope (also known as an Action Scope) is a high level animation channel.
Fragments are played on scopes. (and more technical: actions control scopes)
A scope represents where fragments get triggered. Scopes can be used to drive:
They can also represent more abstract channels:
To do this, each scope has:
Here we see a screenshot of the Mannequin Fragment Editor.
To the left you see a list of the scopes available in this mannequin setup. The four scopes with the movie icon (FullBody3P, Looking, AimPose, Aiming) are part of the scope mask, and we can edit the fragments on those scopes.
We opened up the fragmentID "CoverAction" (see top left), with tags "CoverHigh" and fragtags "CoverLftShoot". This opened up four fragments. The ones on the FullBody3P, AimPose and Aiming scope are clearly visible. The one on the Looking scope is also there, but empty. This also means that when an action plays this combination of fragmentID & tags, there will be nothing playing on the Looking scope.
To understand this example setup, read the tutorial Controlling Looking (and Aiming) for AI in Mannequin.
Scopes are created and edited by editing the Controller Definition File (xxxControllerDefs.xml).