Animtoolbox is a new addon with a set of tools and workflows for animation in Blender.
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TEMP CONTROLS
Bakes your selected bones/controls into a new temporary control rig with new controls which control the original selected controls in the original rig.
Bake Anim to Ctrls - are based on an older addon I wrote called bake anim to empties, however empties are not convinient when working with rig animations, since they are always in object mode and bones are working in pose mode. In this version you can also bake the animation of all selected controls to a new local temporary rig with the controls and the animation baked in world space. Instead of world space you can also use a parent bone based on the original rig bones, and also add child bones for extra control. This is used mostly for space switching technics. After doing all your adjustments in world space, quickly bake back to the original rig and the temporary rig will be removed.
Parent Ctrl on Cursor - Creates a temporary parent bone from cursor - used mostly for temproray pivot. Select your bone controls . position your 3D cursor and press on Parent Ctrl on Cursor. A control rig is created with a bone at the cursor position. All the selected bones are now linked to the bone with āChild ofā Constraints. Rotate and move the parent bone to use as a temporary pivot. When using the operator, a new property is created next to the operator. With this property you can turn off and on all the child of constraints.
Quick Bake Constraints - Quickly bakes the current temp controls back into the original rig and removes the temprorary setup.
Select Constrained Bones - Selects all the bones that are constrained to a temporary rig control
Cleanup - If you are not happy from the results you can always quickly remove of the empties or temporary rig setup.
ANIM TOOLS
Offset Keyframes - Offsets all the keyframes of the selected bones. very usefull together with Bake Anim to Ctrls. I will later make it also interactive so you can use a slider back and forth to try different offset amounts before applying.
Copy World Matrix - Copy and paste the world matrix of an object or a bone. It recalculates also child of constraints, so it will always go back to the same position in world space. Examples for Useful cases:
- Fix sliding legs for cyclic animation that move with a root bone
- When switching between different setups, and things start to jump around
- align object with bones
Copy Relative Matrix - Works only with two selected bones or objects. Copy the distance between the selected object or bone to the active object/bone. go to a different frame or transformation of the active bone, select the first selected bone and paste. The object/bone will move into the same distance from the active object. This can be used instead of parenting, especially during animation blocking phase.
Sharekeys - select multiple bones or objects, with keyframes on different frames in the timeline. press Sharekeys and keyframes will be added to all controls across the timeline, so now they share the same amount of keyframes at the same frames. This also can be usefull during blocking phase.
Frame Range Marker widgets - Added an operator next to the frame range, which adjusts the frame range using Markers. This works also with frame range preview. The temporary markers will be removed when turning off the operator
RIGGERTOOLBOX
A set of tools for creating customized rigs. Current tools are still very experimental. It was initially a separate addon, but decided to join them together and later will also make it work together with temp controls as well as a modular rig tools The current operators are:
Add Chain Controls - Creates a chain of parent and stretch target controls for all the selected bones. can create also closed chains such as mouth loops. Can keep the hierarchy order within the bone controls.
Add Bbone widgets - automatically create controls for Bbones. These are not the built-in standard Blender Bbone controls, but rather controls that are working similiar to bezier handles. They are connected to the bbone properties through drivers.
Merge Rigs - join rigs together into the active rig. Removes duplicated bones and keep their hierarchy order and constraint connection. The duplicated common bones can be used as connection points between the two rigs.
Roadmap
More functions on Temp Controls module, such as:
- Adding smart bake option. I will use animation layerās smart bake module.
- a better solution then parent on cursor, that will include also the original parent/root movement in the temp setup
- Adding more temp control such as a quick basic ik setup. joining with riggertoolbox module
- Use Empty motion path for offseting bone motion paths.
and also
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Making offset an interactive slider, with an apply/cancel options.
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Copy world and relative matrix for a list of keyframes and bake to frame range options
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Micro-values
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Convert rotation axis order while keeping keyframe count and similiar tangent handles (using smart bake)
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Improved and editable motion trails
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Make stuff look nicer and fancier. Add widgets for frame range selection. Nicer motion path
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View only selected armature option (usefull when working with a lot of characters)
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New inbetweeners and blending options
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create lattice from vertex selection with controls
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Auto breather using noise modifiers offsets
