I’m coming from Softimage and with this recent debacle i’m looking at your motion tool as a key for switching…
Over the year (if you know ICE) i’ve managed to create a set of compound who are doing just what Motiontool is doing, managing animation just by proceduraly modulating the current time.
That’s great! I never saw ICE working but i saw a lot of people talking about it when softimage was dropped. If it’s a node based system so i think i need to take a look on it 
- So motion tool is working if i understand right with groups of objects… great, but what about poygon islands and polygon clusters (polygon clusters sorry for the term, in soft this is a group of polygon manually selected in a single mesh) ?
To explain you better, in some (not rares) cases we need to work on a single mesh and animate directly the islands as separated objects, or polygon groups. Is motion tool able to do that or can you consider to implement that ?
Reading your description i think the Blender’s similar of Polygon Cluster is our Vertex Groups. For now MotionTool don’t support it cause handle transformations per vertex is a way more expansive to processing than Objects. But we have plains for future include it as a experimental or at least with a warning that it’s high demand operation. In some specific cases you can use Shape Keys (Morphs) to transform a mesh topology but probably it’s not what you want…
2.a) On Soft, my compounds permits the same with point cloud (managing the SRT of each points for various purpose. Is motiontool able to animate point clouds ??
2.b) If a) i use to also controle “instance animation”, think about a whole hierarchy, pre animated(key frames), point cloud instanced, then proceduraly animated with motion tool, then again proceduraly instances animation delayed ;-). Can motiontool able to do that ? if not… it would be a great idea
I don’t think i complete understand what did you want, probably we can’t do it in exactly same way since Blender don’t have a great Point Cloud support but maybe we can handle it in other ways, can you send a video example about this kind of effect?
3.) “Groups Management”, Are you able to delay with: group order/inverse order/random order/manual ordering by typing the sequence in a field/Diagonal order(for lines of text)/X Y Z ordering/Manual Axe order.
Group ID Assign by Name, Axis (X,-X,Y,-Y,Z,-Z) and Random was implemented in BETA 0.2 version that will be release this week yet, Manual assign was already since BETA 0.1, more modes are coming (Diagonal is a nice idea).
4.) Also about groups and delays, for object you provide easing of the profile animation but, what about the easing profile the delay node, is it already available ? it is VERY important to be able to do that.
That can be a nice addition, never thought about it, something like a Out Back/Out Quad Group Delay… Can be done i think. Noted here for further investigations 
5.) Easing, what about a manual fcurve profile ?
That can be a bit more complicated, but was already in our scope. We’re already investigating about it.
6.) Having managed this stuff from many years i’ll tend to think you miss a full matrix transform node, to be able to tackle some common cases of problem with layered transforms
A Matrix Transformation Node can be a nice addition for hardcore users but we need to find a nice way to expose it as a Node without going to a giant block of data impossible to understand.
Thanks for all your feedback, your experience with other softwares is very contributing for MotionTool development!
Cheers!
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