i had been a blender user a long time ago, but school and life got in the way. plus, i had really wanted to do character animation and blender’s character animation capabilities were very weak back then.
i even wrote a tutorial: http://hatefullyyours.com/3d/later/body/
i decided to get back into 3d because i love it.
further, i am a professional programmer with graphics knowledge. i want to pursue 3d graphics as a career, thus i am considering studying for a phd in graphics.
i want to do some scholarly work involving blender.
i came here to get some ideas about what kind of scripts or plug-ins that users would like to see.
simple ideas are welcome as a small project to get my bearings could be helpful, but my goal is something intellectually significant and, preferrably, of recent development.
i remember that there had been a cloth plug-in back in 2000 or 2001, but i do not see it around today. that would be interesting.
“Motion Capture” - I get a lot of requests to improve blender BVH i/o and I intend to finish the exporter (importer working now), but there a lot more that could be done. and Im too buisy with other stuff to put in the hours…
Importing a BVH and applying to an existing armature as an action (requires name mapping)
Document the best way to apply an animation from 1 BVH to your existing rig (called re targeting?) - needed when you have a rig for your engine/game and you want to use existing BVH data. - May involve some development.
Doc and possibly develop a way to take a BVH and make it loopable.
Cleaning up a BVH- Recently theres been efforts (finished?) - IPO curve smoothing. see if that works well for a bvh animation (1 point per frame is not useable for IPO editing) - if you cant find any curve fitting algo, I worked out 1 and have a python implimentation laying about.
This work is very valuable and Im sure you could even make a dint in blenders character animation user base if these tools became useable!
I would really like to see Euler or some other “human readable” representation of Bone rotation angles in the IPO editor. I’m not sure if Maya/XSI/Houdin are displaying Euler, but idoen’t appear to be Quaternions, or if it is, they have translated it to degrees that correspond with the X/Y/Z axiis.
There was a thread awhile ago discussing why the IPO window shows Quaternion curves, and the basically meaningless values in the Y axis (to most of us) instead of Euler(??) angles. Internally … from what I’ve read, yes Blender should use Quat calculations, but those details should be hidden from the user. Is this something you might be able to figure out … be interested in doing ?
Basil Fawlty has done some work on Quaternions here (python)
Another nice feature would be to have all other animations (or some method of selecting which (layers ?)) play when then “record mouse movemnent” in the IPO window is used :
ideasman42:
you are right that i didn’t want to hear that
the BVH stuff does not sound very sexy from a research point of view.
how involved is it?
do you think that one of those tasks would be a good way to get started in blender plug-in writing?
mike_s:
i am not sure what you mean about what is displayed in the IPO UI. are the curves unintuitive?
i have only done modeling in blender. i am learning how to do rigging right now and i will move on to animation next. so maybe i will have a better idea of what you mean in a couple of weeks.
i am willing to do some grunt work like the BVH stuff if it is a relatively small work load and will help me get my bearings.
