Using realtime keyframe capture, avsynch and good old fashioned slowdown of the audio, I’m getting nice, fast lipsynch and animation:
Now it’s at least possible some of these are already in there, and I know for a fact some of them are, just not easy to use yet. While I plan to do some work on these, I’m still quite a noob relative to bpy, in particular doing anything realtime, so this shouldn’t quite be seen as a todo list, but it’s not /quite/ fair to call it a wishlist either…
Puppetry Scripts:
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Per-channel keyframe insertion: does not activate keyframe record mode but instead has a specific object targeted and specific channels are active/inactive.
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Walktrack: A constraint where an object “follows” a target object at a given distance while rotate tracking to it. Makes it possible to mouse digital actors around on a stage quickly.
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VelociWalk: take magnitude of the derivative of the XYZ fcurves, multiply by a user-settable constant and make that the speed of a walk strip. Bolt onto Walktrack for combined walking tool.
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Animatrigger: auto-insert strips at a given frame triggered by a keypress, mouseclick, etc.
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serialSense: pick up signals from the serial port and turn into motion, either as drivers for action strips or direct connection to transform channels. Enables user-created controllers via Arduino or similar, which would be epic win. (Bonus: write Arduino script for this part that reads all the analog channels by default.)
Setup Scripts:
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Shape Key Automation: Little script, select a bone and up to three shape keys and it ties them to transform channels AND adds local space constraint to the bone, transforming it into a slider for the shape keys. (This makes it fast and easy to learn)
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Setup for VelociWalk, Walktrack and Animatrigger: Basically just a dropdown to select an empty for following and animation strips to connect in.
Final Organization:
Really what we want are Digital Actors: .blends you can drop into a scene and then, with as few steps and dare I say, as little knowledge as possible, move around and generate animated content.
With the AddOn organization in 2.5, I think this could be done in a way that was both easy to start using and unobtrusive to people who don’t want to be bothered by it (important!)