Gao Shan Pictures has just released an addon which provides an animation (and pose) library for Blender.
It’s based on the very popular Studio Library for Maya which is used throughout the animation and VFX industry.
This addon is still under development, but has already been used in feature film production at Gao Shan and is a very useful tool for small to medium size productions.
It’s released under a GPL license.
Get it here…
Any feedback is welcome.
Enjoy!
Update:
Github account restored. Gaolib is available again!
It appears the account has been flagged by github’s bots.
As soon as we get to talk to a human about it, I’ll update you here.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
If you press one of the create buttons, sometimes it will hide the bones in the main 3d window but it won’t reenable them after you close the create window, so you need to go and reenable bone visibility manually which is a bit annoying
When you create a new folder within a folder structure it will minimize all open folders, and you have to re-expand all of them to get back to where you were, instead of it putting you right into the folder you just created
The workflow from the popup isn’t seamless: If I select a set using gaolib but then want to deselct it I press alt+A, but it doesn’t work. I need to click the Blender window first, then the shortcut, then go back to gaolib to select a different set. I’d love to be able to have gaolib as part of blender rather than a popup.
This searchbar feels like it should be here. It looks like it’s a search for everything but it only affects that window
Would be nice if we could change folder colors without having to delete them and recreate them
These are my notes for now. Hoping they will help in creating a more seamless experience. Thanks for the plugin!
P.S.
It would be nice to be able to drag poses, sets, etc into folders using drag n drop, but I don’t know if that’s too difficult with the Blender API
Thanks for the great feedback!
A few of your notes touch on a known issue we have right now; the fact that it’s running from a popup gives us several problems. The big one for me is the thumbnail creation, which involves three clicks in two windows, which is less than ideal, and is to do with context issues.
We’re working on it (well, mainly the brilliant Anne Beurard, who is the main developer), and we’ll take your suggestions on board.
Great to know someone is using the addon!
For now, I agree the most important problems (and also the most difficult to fix) come from the use of a pop up. Unfortunately the issue you mention with alt+A for now isn’t likely to be fixed soon. Also, for the bone visibility problem, I’ve tried to automatically reset it, but for now the only fix I could come up with was to add the last button in the toolbox to unhide the bones (Show overlay hidden).
As you have noticed, there are a lot of improvements to do with the folders management, I need to take the time to work on it.
I’ll try to post a message here when I update the project
Thanks to blendermonkey’s feedback, here are some updates on the main branch of the project :
If you press GAOLIB button while the popup is already open you’ll get this error (expected behaviour was that the pop-up would close) => FIXED
When you create a new folder within a folder structure it will minimize all open folders, and you have to re-expand all of them to get back to where you were, instead of it putting you right into the folder you just created => FIXED (There was the same problem when deleting an item, it’s currently being taken cared of)
This searchbar feels like it should be in the list view. It looks like it’s a search for everything but it only affects that window => FIXED
Also, there’s now additive mode!
Rather than replacing the existing pose, it adds (or subtracts) the pose from the library using a slider. This can be very useful for facial and hand animation, for example.
It’s now possible to
-Rename folders and items
-Change location of folders and items
-Modify folder color
All three features are available by clicking the Modify button of an item. I couldn’t get drag and drop to work, but I came up with that as the next best thing
Hi ! It’s supposed to be working on blender 3.1 so I guess it should as well for blender 3.3. And if it doesn’t, I will eventually make it work for it too. I’m not working full time on this so when there are things to be fixed, it can take some time before I deal with them.
Testing on 3.3 Alpha, it doesn’t seem to work at all.
After creating a pose, the Bones viewport overlay is turned off. Turning it back on manually is a massive pain.
More importantly, applying poses does… nothing:
Unless I’m missing something obvious, this is currently a pose screenshotter that slows things down significantly with the bone overlay problem and then doesn’t let you use the poses anyway.
I’m very interested in this theoretically, but I’m un-installing for now. Hopefully development continues and this becomes more usable
Oh, also, the New Folder button doesn’t work, you have to add folders in Explorer (on Windows), which really defeats the point of having a pop-up file browser
