Animation workarounds

[DickM]

Well, I agree completely with what you want Brian. :applause: I was thinking about a small step, but yes, what you explain is great.

It's how xpresso works in C4D. And from what I've seen, ICE in XSI. Select a channel to drive another channel in a clean intuitive interface. Would rock to have such functionality in EIAS. Xp can become daunting fast.

These are the tools animators want! :thumbsup: Workflow speed would increase drastically.

[DickM]

As always Richard, great work on the Captain.

It's my fault the topic changed... I was curious if QT would migrate to other EIAS apps.

I saw some of your other animated captian files on the EITG site, your are certainly making good progress with facial animation.

Cheers, and thanks for showing the slider work.

~Mike

Thanks Mike, greatly appreciated. I am still very proud of the work I had accomplished in Animator with the Captains rig. I hated to leave Animator with the Captain, but I wanted so much more for him and kept running into roadblocks. Now I have drastically more control over him and a facial rig that is awesome.

[cjberg]

Thanks Mike, greatly appreciated. I am still very proud of the work I had accomplished in Animator with the Captains rig. I hated to leave Animator with the Captain, but I wanted so much more for him and kept running into roadblocks. Now I have drastically more control over him and a facial rig that is awesome.

Yes, you are the rigging master... those sliders are great... you must be the XP master!
:hmm:

[DickM]

hehehe, yes, as I have said several times on this forum.....Cj was a major help with XP. When I asked if something was possible or how it could be done, he was there helping me every step of the way. :applause:

Thank You Ceej! :bowdown: :bowdown: :bowdown:

[cjberg]

even though not devised as such, XP is the best thing to happen to EI CA since the FCE. It is a lot easier to create complex movements through XP than to manually animate multiple pieces of an object... bending fingers and other controls can be combined to get complex movements with simple controls...

This technique has been used for many years with other apps, and is standard with CA rigging.

[DickM]

Yes Cj, Xp is incredibly helpful and useful as I learned. But in it's current state, a lot of work has to be done to set up some simple functionality as far as CA rigging goes. The creation of the gui for one, then coding. Yes, I am lazy, want it easier and faster :twisted:

[Vizfizz]

Well the alternative to a custom slider bar interface would be a dedicated "channel" window that would grant you access to an object, null or plugins' channels in one nice simple interface and then use something like virtual sliders to manipulate data. The only "EI" tool that contains virtual sliders that I'm aware of is Triple D's Power Particles Pro.

[plsyvjeucxfw]

If we had a library of already constructed wire objects in .fact format, well, that part would just be importing and setting up the interface we wanted.

Then, if we had a PICKWIP tool like After Effects, half the work of linking parameters together would be done for us.

A little bit of math, and the final eXPression would give us our output.

The Igors have already discussed adding set driven key and custom attribute channels, so perhaps these SMALL steps could be added.

[Vizfizz]

There's a number of factors that will modify how this will work. Ultimately, when creating a character rig, you don't want to litter your setup with a lot of unnecessary nodes and fact models. There are naming issues and customization issues you want to have access too.

While an imported fact model may be "lighter" per se on the performance of your rig's controls, they're fixed and can not be modified in anyway inside of Animator. Riggers want the ability to shape their controls, assign custom channels, and alter colors of the wire to code controllers for different sides of the body. The only option here would be to offer a plugin as a replacement to fact import. Question here would be if whether or not a plugin would produce a performance hit over than imported model.

The trade off is customization vs overhead.

I offered up the idea of a stripped down Trestle so the artist could draw his own controller shapes in Animator, however another idea is something akin to UberShape where the user could pick from a library of various prebuilt wire controllers (Arrows, Squares, Circles, etc) that could be color coded as needed. A potential "custom" shape mode could be offered that could read a fact wire and turn it into a controller for use with this plugin. The main advantage of going the plugin route would be the ability to generate custom attribute channels upon execution of the plugin. Thus if you wanted to create a facial rig controller that possesses say 10 different attributes (like blink, smile, frown etc), the plugin would permit the user to create a min and max data ranges for each attribute, assign a data type (like boolean, float, or integer etc to that attribute) and then generate a slider control that the user could use to modify his animation. (similar to the morph window). Using non-modal plugin windows an the ability to keep a plugin open and interactive with the work windows would allow a user to see the updates in real time.

The question would be if this is too much overhead. The only alternative would be to create a whole new class of nulls that would be integrated into Animator that could provide this level of functionality inside the program rather than through a plugin link.

[Vizfizz]

While the idea of custom on screen wires, like Richard's Captain example and Dave's Heliodon, is good... it can get to the point where clutter becomes a factor. A potential option may be a dedicated controller window that can be set aside from the work windows that offers a way to visualize custom controllers without getting in the way of the scene. This could eliminate the need to turn off the renderability of all elements in a controller with custom material settings.

[arketype]

Sorry- just cross posting into this thread So I don't hijack the Tesla thread any further ;)
This is a good simple sample that everyone ca look at to see what we are talking about with XP and imported geometry. In fact, everyone can see how simple the XP code is.

I released this previously, but I'll post about it again...

This is a small project which allows rotation of GI skymaps, RT reflection Maps, and RT Refraction maps simultaneously with a single controller object.

It is very simple, and includes instructions.


http://www.arketypedesign.com/Downloads/SkyDomeController.zip

Have fun everybody :)
Dave

[A.C. Farley]

Thanks Dave.

[shoutzager]

Hey Richard,

XP can do it....

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