The New Animation System 2020 : Character animation system

After a few months, reviewing the responses in this post, I gradually became calm. Under the heavy development task, it is unrealistic to develop a lot of suggestions for a single intelligent function. So, I have summarized the very important 3 basic functions, they can improve the working experience by 80%. When these functions are included in the core functions, animator users will obviously feel that “everything should be like this”.

  1. Animation layer
    (Unlimited animation layer supporting single bone or part of bone)
  2. Editable motion track
    (Support automatic change of motion trajectory-curve and interpolation interval over time-rhythm through the handle)
  3. Ghost shadow / onion skin function
    (Supports automatic display before and after ghosting, supports automatic refresh, also supports single-frame fixed ghosting, supports one-click creation of ghosting before and after the current frame
    )
7 Likes

This is why you should never ask us what we want :wink:

Those all sound good to me.

I vote against ghosting. I used ghosting, and it gets annoying if you do not use trivial setup. It produces a bunch of overlaping ghost shapes, clutters everything. I notice its hard to gasp whats going on.

Imo, motion paths is a much cleaner solution.

Motion paths do update on (object) transformations. Motion paths do not update if you tweak fcurves. Currently, thats my biggest problem with motion paths.

3 Likes

I think it can be done a smart way, there is a plugin for Maya that someone developed, Ghost can be set on specific frames instead of the whole range, this is much cleaner and easier to work with.

1 Like

Yes I made one for Maya. Been thinking about implementing something like that in Blender but right now this is way over my head and I don’t really have the time.

I think motion Paths and Ghosting have their use cases. So why not both :smiley:

2 Likes

Regarding the Ghost shadow / Onion skin function there are some addons that offer this feature:

Mh … thinking about a combination of few key Ghosts and Motion Paths (how poses propagate between Ghosts).

How does computer know which frames to chose? We put labels on keys. Keyframe Types.

Keyframe ||| Breakdown ||| Moving Hold ||| Extreme ||| Jitter

Maybe, these could be used to tell computer which one could be used for Ghosting?

Ghosts would be invisible, unless time approaches one of the ‘Ghosted keyframe type’ poses. Motion paths show the flow between the poses.

Just an idea.

This is how it looks like in Cascadeur if you activate the ghosts only on the keyframes.

2 Likes

I dont have experience with cascadeur. I find single figures doing awesome stuff. Cant find information about how to use cascadeur with many chars in full pbr, with environment and assets.

Its visually appealing. But I am not sure this need be an advantage. The problem with ghosts are the same. They overlap. First ones overlap and merge to something with 10 legs, I wont be able to see whats going on there. Except, 4 poses (mid area, with little overlaps).

12 rendered ghosts means: model has to render 12 times. Now, add many chars with hi-res data. A complete environment.

What do you think? Would there be an impact on playback speed?

The most exciting thing in that video to me is the dynamic tessellation that happens on the fly in the viewport. This is something Blender should prioritize implementing for Animation 2020. Gives a huge boost to performance while not sacrificing visual fidelity, which is important for animators.

I wonder if that kind of tech is something that also can be applied to live modeling/sculpting as well.

Does anyone know if developers have planned to implement it in blender?
The technology in the video is impressive!

It is not recommended to use a large number of ghosts, but separate key ghosts for key frames are very comfortable, and it would be more wonderful if they could be updated automatically.

1 Like

Mh …
Motion paths could describe how current pose will change. But they do not not reveal key poses. A few key ghosts would fill the gap.

A clever combination of few ghosts for key frames (minimize or avoid overlapping) and motion paths would be nice.

We know, Blender does support different keyframe types. (Keyframe, Breakdown, Moving Hold, Extreme, Jitter.)
Why not use them for ghosts? It would be nice if these could be used to filter ghosts.
( Only ghost Extremes, or ghost Extremes and Breakdowns. Etcetera …)

Live update of ghosts and motion paths would help to get precise control and avoid to get caught in try-and-error loop.

1 Like

Except for Ton’s anouncments, nothing has happen yet, has it? I know they working hard on bugfixing and yet they still improving Greace Pencil stuff on the side but nothing that push this project foreward. I wish this had a higher priority.

1 Like

As of now, simply having fast deformation and playback (the latter being considered a high priority on the dev blog) is far more important than more advanced rigging features.

As hinted, some of the devs. seem to think so as well.

3 Likes

I think this is because everyone has always been helpless…

More creative with ideas!!it’s nice!!

1 Like

https://twitter.com/sastuvel/status/1238422223616180224

2 Likes

and some are still pretending that the system of animation is not tricky in Blender :wink: big lol
2 Likes

and alembic maybe to do some alcohol in blender :rofl:

great I can’t imagine the time spent doing this in Blender. and about suggestion for maya, asked them… Blender is free software, I don’t understand why they want imitate so much pro tricky software, when simple softwares are doing things better and faster and much simpler for most of the people.