I want to animate this way
Check the awesome videos!

http://www.animanium.com/index.html
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yeeahh.. it's .. genius.

yeeahh.. it's .. genius.
Espescially how fast it is.. And now non-techinical it is

This animation system was influenced by the mirai
motion builder package where the underlying idea
is that everything is part of one big IK system
unless it is pinned or glued down. The other
nice concept with these packages: IK is
a posing tool, not an interpolation tool
(the implicit FK rotations are what get
interpolated). These are nice concepts
that would make for a pretty cool animation
system ... don't know how hard they would
be to program. One thing that would have been
nice is some footage of the creation of a rig.

Chris

Hos, in mirai its all setup with Rotation limits for each bone, ie when one bone reaches it's limits, the next bone is rotated!

Quote:

Hos, in mirai its all setup with Rotation limits for each bone, ie when one bone reaches it's limits, the next bone is rotated!

hehe, that's what i was expecting from constraints when they were first introduced... angle contraints etc...

Dani

i read a paper recently that seemed to suggest that limiting rotation to a single axis was relatively easy, something like just setting one strip in the array to 0,0,0,0 or something like that.

it went on to say that putting angle limits on a joint wasn't a particularly great leap either, though more complicated than that.

this was using a jacobian matrix, like blender, i think.
anyway, the paper said it's not too difficult, compared to some of the other stuff you might want to do with a kinematic system.

later
BEAT

Thanks for the link. Art of Illusion added the 'pin and drag' interface to the latest beta, and apparently 3D Canvas also has a similar interface.

So it's shouldn't be too hard to add to Blender.

The animanium videos have shocked me as well. The speed the animators are working at, and getting such good results I think will change the industry.

kid_tripod: i am sure its faster in the videos then in reality

There's one of a guy doing a kick and hitting into something and jumping off. It's clearly being done in real time, as both the talent of the animator using it, and the softwares abilities are quite obvious.

The other simply scary one is the woman dancing.

There are certainly elements of this animation system that I would love to have in Blender, but there are others that I simply find anoying (the key-framing system, for example, which doesn't appear to give any interpolation control, or let you keyframe different parts of the character at different frames).

Thanks for the link! It's always nice to get a source of new ideas.

Actually, there does appear to be a way of controlling interpolation - check out this page from the [url=url=http://sega.jp/animanium/index.htm]Japanese site[/url]. The English site is worthless - they keep promising to release the product "Real Soon Now" - it was supposed to be released in October, and it's still not out - they've had to extend the beta because of bugs. I can't even find out what it's supposed to cost.

As I mentioned, it's certainly feasible to do it (the author of Art of Illusion added it when he reworked AoI's IK, and there's apparently nothing too complicated about it.

From the Blender Funboard (and other places) it's become apparent that Blender's IK needs to be tweaked - it recalculates everything on the fly, which can really slow things down - and it would be great if 'pin and drag' could be added into Blender as that code is being overhauled.

dcuny wrote:

From the Blender Funboard (and other places) it's become apparent that Blender's IK needs to be tweaked - it recalculates everything on the fly, which can really slow things down - and it would be great if 'pin and drag' could be added into Blender as that code is being overhauled.

The recalculation problem is not IK specific but affects the whole deformation with armature system. AFAIK, it's not really the armature motion in itself that is long to recalculate but the deformation on the mesh.

Martin
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Hos wrote:

This animation system was influenced by the mirai motion builder package where the underlying idea is that everything is part of one big IK system unless it is pinned or glued down. The other nice concept with these packages: IK is a posing tool, not an interpolation tool (the implicit FK rotations are what get interpolated). These are nice concepts that would make for a pretty cool animation system ... don't know how hard they would be to program. One thing that would have been nice is some footage of the creation of a rig. Chris

Slight Nit Pick: In MotionBuilder you have explicit control over fk/ik interpolation switching (It should be possible to set up a relation to make this automatic..) and in mirai it decides based upon whether or not a joint has stayed stationary in x/y/z between any two keyframes. if it HAS then its an IK solve inversly up the bone hierachy until it gets to a branch point in the tree. Otherwise it's an fk solve. Simple, elegant and (IMO) perfect.

As far as creation of rigs in animanium is concerned: it dosnt happen. you have to do it in the 'host' application that you export out to animanium from. even those little 'lock handles' must be modelled by hand (!).

Cheers,
Zarf.