New animation tool technology preview

Ooooooooo

1 Like

@gianmichele
this looks great! Exactly what I wished for blender and suggested some time ago to aligorith

I wonder how hard this is to implement. Because Motionpaths can be calculated in Blender. Now we “just” need some handles to adjust them!!! This would be awsome!! :smiley:

What I see here is a great way to adjust speed movements and ‘smoothness’ :yes:

this is sweet. i don’t see any reason this couldn’t be outdone in blender.
There’s nothing in blender’s system stopping this from being written is what i mean, so i’m glad this was posted so hopefully some coder might get inspired.

I don’t get it. what is so special about this you can already do this in blender.
clamp a cube to a nurbs path set frames at 0,30,and 60 and use the x location curve in the graph editor to drive the speed. Or am I missing something here.

Uploader Comment:

no graph editors were harmedï»ż in the making of this video :wink:

That actually looks really nice for the more non-technical among us (me).

@sx-1
You won’t create a path for each bone you want to animate :wink:
This a auto generated paths from keyframing, and instead manipulating the f-curves you can manipulate the motion in 3d view itself!!! This would be much more intuitive and comprehensive I think!

That’ll make our lives so much easier! What an intuitive way to adjust timing and arcs D:

@sago
isn’t it standard practice to use the x-curve to drive the speed and the y-curve ( for blender, read z-curve ) to drive the height.
Looks to me like they took an existing technology and dressed it up with an interface which appeals to children.
P.S. what’s the point of the yellow dots?. you can tell the speed by watching the sphere. what if, instead of yellow dots they displayed real values like vector output and input speeds?.
@ndee
I didn’t see any bones in this demo. can you post a link to the demo where they “create a path for each bone”.
In the video he keyframes the sphere, selects the sphere and adds a path. In blender you key frame the sphere add path select the sphere and in the modifiers panel clamp the sphere to the path. It may be a different work flow but the number of required inputs is roughly the same. Is there a significant difference between dragging the mouse in a 2d view or dragging the mouse in the 3d view? I mean it’s not rocket science. I don’t know what you mean by more comprehensive what they demonstrate here is very basic

This are in 3d space adjustable and keyframe “generated” motioncurves. They don’t need to be set up before. This will work the same for a character rig with lots of bones. Sorry it isnt’t that easy to explain for me. But Blender doesn’t have this feature.
The method you described will definitely not work for a character rig!

@ndee
I think we’re coming at this from different angles, because I’m looking at what’s being presented and thinking maya doesn’t have this feature and there are no bones, it’s a preview with a disclaimer stating that what is demonstrated may not be delivered .
I think you’re looking at it in terms of what may be possible for blender or maya.
If you look again at the preview you will see that the sphere already has animation applied before the curve is added. so I don’t see where the idea that you don’t need to set it up first comes from also there are no bones in the demo. I can only conclude that you’re not actually referring to the video but are actually talking about some idea you had some time ago. and it would seem that this idea you had, covered a lot more ground than is actually being demonstrated in this video.
I hold to my original point what is being demoed here can easily be done in blender, I will concede however that to do it in blender requires that you have two views open, but I don’t see that as a major drawback.
P.S.
It’s just hit me, what you’re refering to: they have it in lightwave where the bone curves are drawn on screen along with their keyframes and can be directly edited in the 3d view. If that is what you mean then we’re talking about two completely different things.
I think in lightwave you would change speed by changing keyframes but I believe what they’re doing here is changing the vector speed of the animation curve (in which case the keyframes remain in place).

of course you need to have an animation first. thats what I mean with keyframe generated motioncurves. If you have a motion from a to b, you also have a motion path for that movement. blender is able to calculate such a motionpath, BUT in blender you are not able to manipulate such a motion path, you need to manipulate keyframes. and thats exactly what is possible in maya now. I don’t know if you have used after effects yet. After Effects does exact the same thing, just in 2D(and without the timing possibility). This is a great and intuitive way to animate.
It doesn’t matter if it is an object or a bone for the calculation of an motion path :slight_smile:

And yes, I am referring to the exact same video as is shown above. I hope I am a bit clearer this time :smiley:

@ndee
you answered before I’d finished editing my post, Please refer to the last paragraph.

Looks like very intuitive, wonder how/if it handles rotation an scaling?..

I wasn’t really impressed at first, but then I had some time to think
 it actually would be amazing addition to Blender animation toolkit.

Basically it’s just a different user interface for the motion speed. This can be done in Blender as well. Here’s the functionality implemented as a python script.

Note that this is just a proof of concept, and is easy to crash. It could also be expanded to work on bones, etc. or have the time beads (green points in video) behave differently, but I just wanted to show this is actually possible in Blender.

Here’s a .blend file to play with. It needs a current SVN version of Blender (grab one at graphicall).
Some notes:
yellow dots = keyframes
green dots = time beads
Right-mouse button to select a time bead (doesn’t work if time bead is too close to an object).
Q-key to move a time bead and Q-key again to confirm movement. Escape to cancel movement.

The code is GPL licensed. Personally I’m too busy with other scripts to properly implement this, but perhaps someone else gets inspired by it :).

What i miss from the other programs to Blender is that using the other programs is more graphical. “What you see is what you get.” But using Blender is often: “Guess what happens if you change this value”

edit: Crouch, this looks amazing what you made

trust crouch to come up with a blender poc, good on ya crouch
you continually amaze me with your talents in coding.

but yes this would be a great idea for loads of stuff

Crouch, you are genius! I mean, I already knew that. but
 this was very fat and right on the subject. I hope that something good would came out of this.