I really like the way Blender is heading now that Project Orange is encouraging the
Animation features to become better.
Not to mention the “Real-Time” animation environment.
I’m sitting here right now totally BLOWN away by the sheer speed
that I can work with Blender as it is progressing now.
Some of you might remember the “hugo” character I posted a while ago
under finished projects…
Imagine a cartoon character moving around in all viewports at the same time.
Imagine being able to move every viewport in realtime freely around so you
can see your moving work from all angles…
Imagine further you can do this with opengl lights and set them exactly where you
think they should be…as seen when the light hits the character various places…
Further imagine that you can move the character around like a puppet…with the
new IK (which seem to be the Old IK just a gazillion times easier to set up and add/remove)
And imagine being able to add other…motions…objects…and move them
around in realtime…while recording…
It’s getting possible now! I’m sitting here trying out the latest CVS commits
and it’s blowing me away. I wish I had some way of recording it with a video-capture
thingy on Linux (as I use Linux for this)…then you’d see what I mean…
Anyway…you all will see what it is sooner or later - I just had to tell you this
because I’m so happy about where Blender is heading.
This could be what would set it apart from other apps. Not that its free…but
that it’s mindboggling intuitive and fun to use. It makes you WANT to animate.
It puts the FUN back in animation.
Man …can you tell I’m excited.
Can’t wait until all the other animation features gets into it as well.
Kudos to the coders!
I have been looking into the new cvs when I get the time. Is the new animation system offering us automatic ik rigging and switching, etc? Tell us more JoOngle.
It has made rigging real easy and intuitive compared to before. I was one of those
that had to learn it the hard way, so I know how to do it before…but I remember the
PAIN it was to go all the way with the old IK.
Don’t worry - You’ll never have to go trough that process again.
Rigging as it is NOW with the upcoming blender:
Make your armature by adding armature object as usual…BUT with a difference.
Only ONE bone gets added at start…so you can move it anywhere you want to
before you “extrude” the additional bones.
To add additional bones…just CTRL + LMB click as many bones as you need
it’s as easy as drawing a spline.
Now for the fun part… select the bones you want to be part of an IK chain…
(for those that doesn’t know…it’s just a flexible chain of bones instead of a chain
of-individually-moved-bones…in short…that is)
Go to the editbones menu and click on IK on each bone you want to be part of the IK.
Now…go to POSEMODE…and select the LAST BONE in your IK chain.
Click on CTRL + I to tell the system that you want the IK chain to “chain-here”.
You now get the optional “DUMMY” (empty) …add it…and get a “empty” object to control the chain.
Repeat for as many legs/arms/tentacles etc your character have…and it will work like
a charm. These bones stay TRUE to the direction of the empty rather than just
swirl madly about… pretty neat!
I’ll keep testing on more features as they come in.
Yeah …and let´s hope that the “restraint & curve” toolkit will be a cool easily accessible
kit instead of us having to go into that #"%!"¤& curve editor every instance…
“On-the-fly” & easy pose-to-pose animation modes are the way to go!
Gabio:
I’d be pleased to. More new stuff you say? Sounds exciting…bring it on!
(where is that thread again?)
Thanks!
It’s not a hamster… I think it´s a bear of some sort. Dunno… Unfortunately I cannot
take credit for the design …it’s converted from a 2D-cartoon…and I loved it so
much I decided to convert it to 3d (yes…I did model and rig it)…but the original
Cartoon (hand-drawn design) is copyright a company in Denmark called A-Film
I am not affiliated with this company in any way… I’m just a fan of the character
so It was made into 3D…
Anyway…
What still bakes my noodle is how the now near “Automatic IK” figures out how
to “roll” perfectly around the IK ends…
…Nearly NO adjustments where needed. In case you guys don’t understand what
I’m rambling about it’s as follows:
When I’m moving around “Hugo’s” hands…they follow his body perfectly meaning
when his hands touch his stomach …they lay flat on the stomach as they should…
…when his hands are on his back…Oh well… you get the point… Works almost
so perfect it’s spooky :o
Even when I move around the head with IK chains…the hands and body orient itself
naturally.
It’s really spooky! IK with AI ??? Or just coincidence?
IK gives the same results as before (it is intended to anyway). There is no new IK engine or anything like that… just the UI changed. Must be a coincidence, or a bug that got fixed.
I added an armature and extruded for a total of 3 bones. Then I selected the last bone in the chain, and pressed CTRL-I to create the IK chain, which placed an Empty at the end of the bone. I could then drag the empty around with the armature IK reacting perfectly!
I didn’t have to click each bone to become part of the IK chain… not sure if I’m just doing this wrong or if Joongle’s method give more control?
I think what JoOngle meant by clicking an IK button is for setting bones that are separate as part of one chain. If you create bones at separate times, they will not be connected in a chain so you need to go into editmode (maybe only posemode for new system) and set all the bones to IK under edit buttons.
Well, I tried out the cvs, and the IK solving really is better and more natural (then again I’ve only played with it for around 10 minutes.) One thing that really impressed me is that the armatures update much faster on a subsurfed mesh and even faster if you use the new subsurf option of turning on incremental calculation in object mode. I haven’t tried much, but apparently you get a seg fault if you try to select linked bone chains in edit mode (“L”) (at least in Linux).
The animation took about 10-15 minutes or so…didn’t take long.
The fun part is that it’s all done with the “dummies” that the new system creates
and as you can see from the screenshot…it’s only keyed at each 10 frames.
cekuhnen:
All the realtime stuff seem to be an intended part as it’s working already.
But the “restraint & curve toolkit menu” was just a wish…but reading the
developers logs…they seem to have similar ideas… so who knows? Maybe
we get it? I hope so!
What you can do in realtime (to some extent…what you ALREADY can do with 2.37a)
is:
If you use the Time-line to playback animations instead of the Alt + A then you can
potentially:
create new objects on the fly
Work with objects AND armature in posemode (2.38/40 only)
Change keys as they animate
Watch what new lights do to your animated scene on-the-fly (openGL lamp only, spot!)
Edit in other windows …ex. the action/NLA …etc windows.
Pretty cool I’d say. This makes for a very “intuitive” way of working with a scene
much better than just “setting it all ahead” and “hoping” for it to work right.
brecht:
I’m not entirely convinced of that yet. I tried it out with some older versions
and they do NOT behave the same way, not even on my other computers (Windows/OS X)
So something significant must have changed somewhere.
It seem that another difference with the new IK system versus the old is that the
beginning of the chain (where the bone is attached to a NON IK bone) now acts
like a “spring” holding the bone in-place until the chain has been fully extended/streched
as it “snaps” into place and only animate when it has to. Interesting stuff… don’t know
if this is to be permanent…but if it is… It’ll be very useful for obvious reasons
What’s new that you love so much: IPO handle now have a auto mode. When you add a key, the handle will remain horizontal, which give smoother curve.
Dummie stuff like empty is cool, but not very usefull in en action windows.
You can now select more than one bone in posemode and still get a “active” bone like in object mode. Try to select the target, then the iksolver and press CTRL-I, youll be able to use the bone instead.
how can i get the CVS versions to work? i download them, and i just get a executable, so i put it in the same folder as my current blender version, and it still doesnt work. am i missing somthing?
EDIT: ok, it says i need libpng.so, where can i get that?
Weird, it seems to behave the same here. But I can image some cases where the results could be somewhat different, due to constraints getting evaluated in a different (more correct) order.
But I can assure you there have been no changes to the IK solver in bf-blender, since I’m working on the IK solver myself (although none of my code is in bf-blender yet).
I’d be interested to see a small example file where the current code does things magically better, to avoid breaking that behaviour :).
Quick’n’dirty…no fancy stuff…just a test.