Animesh addon, getting some suggestions and ideas

Hi everyone, this is a repost of an older thread which was deleted without any particularly reason by no one…

I am working on an add-on which will helps to make procedural animations on meshes. It is totally inspired from the Transform tool by Grayscalegorilla, except that it will be open-source. Up to now, there is nothing actually done, I am just doing some researches to animate a mesh’s polygons based on an animation reference.

I would like to get your opinions on this and the feature you would like to have when you want to do motion graphics. I have a lot of idea that I wrote down, I think I have enough to work on, but external ideas are better and maybe more useful.

Anyway, here is a quick thing I made, all vertices are animated based on an Empty animation. I am using normals to animate the vertices.
And I applied a wiggle on the Empty just for the demo.
Next step is to do the same, but on polygons.

https://media.giphy.com/media/3og0IAGIKTWnnyQQEw/giphy.gif


I implemented a polygon animation. Next step is to have fun with this and implement falloffs :slight_smile:

https://media.giphy.com/media/xUA7b5kT1lw6duFdGE/giphy.gif

I would like suggestions on:

  • mesh management with python (first time I dev on Blender, I used to dev on Maya before) to have an optimized tool.
  • how do you think I should do the interface ? I thought of doing a panel on each object we wanted to use the tool
  • what kind of features would be useful

Here is the scene of the last gif and the first gif (tested right before upload), Animation is required for the moment:

drive vertices - blend file
drive faces with thickness - blend file

For the first, if you want to change the shape, you have to add the same geometry in the original mesh and in the procedural_animation mesh
For the last, you change the original_mesh, then apply an edge split of 0 degrees (to unconnect the faces) and then delete the procedural animated mesh, the script will create a new one automatically.

Hey guys, I implemented a falloff. Up to now, it is based on polygons order, but I will eventually add the possibility to choose an axis or a custom object.

Here is the result:
https://media.giphy.com/media/xUPGcrTk5hyZoGDr7W/giphy.gif
And the same thing but with the reference on left:
https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohzdIZWPFiLWY92RG/giphy.gif

You can download the blend file of this (the script is included): https://framadrop.org/r/lE61zHEGMX#An6enLpjxdsw4uILLdbtwRbiTIXr1+TIoO62fAIEaoo=

Give me some feedback !

looking good :slight_smile:

Ok so thanks to Jacques Lucke, I noticed that the tool I wanted to make already exists, it is called ANIMAX and was published 4 days ago on the Blender market, it’s not free though. So I guess I will not go further. I will maybe find other ideas or other possibilities to facilitate motion graphics in blender :slight_smile:

I would not say this is reason to stop, keep going

Ok thanks, I will see how to make it different and better :slight_smile: