Hello everyone, so there was this addon on 2.6 which was basically motion paths on steroids. It drew a curve from the selected bones’ transform through your animation in real time and allowed you to edit the curve in order to edit the animaiton.
here is a demo of what the addon was able to do in its 2.6 glory.
A friend of mine, Ikeiwa is trying to make it work for 2.8 but has trouble fixing the portion of the code that makes the addon unusable right now. He published it on github so if you wanna test it and improve it, i warmly encourage you to do that
I got this mostly working but I can’t say for certain it’s 100% correct, learned a lot of new things while updating this. I’m not very familiar with this addon either. However, it lets you enable/disable, draws properly, select things, move, inserts keyframes, etc.
hi, thanks very much. I removed this from 2.8 release series and it’s now in addons contrib in nightly builds still broken. Are you interested in helping updating motion trails for Blender 2.82 release?
Yeah, I could try, I need to learn some more about how addons work internally but 2.82 is awhile out so I’ve got time to get better familiar with the addon and code. Where exactly is the official addons contrib repo?
It would be really great to have this in the trunk. It’s so useful it should be a standard part of Blender (not even an add-on you should have to activate, i.m.h.o.). 3ds Max has this functionality since as long as I can remember.
Oh my god!!! thanks a million for getting interest in this, I’ll definitly try it in the minute but wanted to thank you first, I was so sad to see such little interest for animation in blender and I can’t stress how thankfull i am. My friend tried to work on it but since he doesn’t know python and was busy with his work, he couldn’t try further. You guys are absolute legends.
hi, It’s officially up for grabs/abandoned, your welcome to take maintain ownership. tbh, I was 1 button click away from removing entirely from Blender as Bart Crouch has been inactive for some time now.
Thanks again.
I’ll take it over so please don’t remove it. I’ll create a task and stuff once I’m closer to feeling 100% on the way it functions and happy with the code. I know I forgot to remove some old stuff I commented out, the acceleration lines don’t draw properly and I need to figure out if the select event is correct.
It’s all good, it was one of the few I kept in that were broken. It appears I was waiting for you Take your time, it’s a 2.82 target, so we have around a month before we can act on release. I’ll keep an eye out for your task.
First of all, thank you so much for bringing this great addon to 2.8. It’s already pretty well worked when I animate objects, but I will be very delightful if it can be used with armature.
When I enabled this in Pose Mode, Blender just fleezed. I know this addon is not for Pose Mode, so is there any way to manipulate specific bones in Object Mode with this addon, or is there a posseblitiy of Pose Mode support in future update?
I agree, pose mode support would be the main apeal of the addon to me, I think this addon, if it gets more attention could really change the way we animate in blender, not replace the good ol graph editor, but still allow easy animation blocking and easy tweaking of timing. Yet it could serve as a great visual representation to see what is wrong with your animation. It’s kinda sad animation get kinda ignored by blender, but i guess it’s gonna be more adressed in later versions.
Yeah, sorry, I didn’t get to pose mode when I was working on this and the addon, in general, is definitely not complete. It’s on my list of things to test & fix.
I did some work on the addon last night: I applied all my changes to the original code from the BAC repo(no pushes yet) and made it draw the gradient lines for Acceleration/Speed modes. Also fixed some bugs with matrix multiplication operators used in Python. I did verify the Pose mode hangs as soon as you have some keyframes and it tries to draw. That’s going to be fun to debug.
Well, it’s crashing on a pretty innocuous thing used everywhere in Blender addons, so I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet and build 2.80 and debug Python because the old “print stuff until it fails” debugging method didn’t work out. I thought maybe a regression from T52524 was causing an exception to get swallowed and then it was stuck in an infinite loop but fixed that and it still hangs.
Take your time, it’s a 2.82 target, so we have around a month before we can act on release. I’ll keep an eye out for your task.