Bone Tool

[phillycheese007]

Will VGC animation need something like the "bone tool" in cacani? for working out tweens with more drastic rotation?

[dalboris]

Hi @phillycheese007 ,

I don't know if there will be something exactly similar to the Bone Tool in Cacani (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV46dFf2iVc), but there should definitely be something to be able to control the trajectories of tweens, including drastic rotations.

I envision a tool where you would directly draw rough trajectories ( = "arcs of motion", or "speed lines"), and the interpolation would loosely follow those trajectories. This could be similar to how a lead traditional animator might annotate its keys for an assistant animator to draw the inbetweens.

I would love the interface to look somehow like those hand-drawn images:

(source: http://www.animatedspirit.com/the-breakdown-key/)

Those trajectories might also include timing charts directly in them, like we see in the second image above. Anyway, this is the "vision", all of this will take a long time to implement. :)

[phillycheese007]

Very cool. Vpaint rocks. Rigging while drawing is blowing my mind. are you going to finish VGC illustration before working on VGC animation? or both at the same time?

regarding the 3d view you say this"At this stage, it is unclear whether it is relevant to expose such visual-ization to end users."

I found this super helpful visualizing how i need to sculpt form to get a proper inbetween. if the inbetweens were"pickable" in 3d that would be cool but still very helpful to get a sense of form. I really hope you keep this feature!

[dalboris]

Thanks for the kind comments :) I'm planning to work on VGC Illustration and VGC Animation at the same time, because I need to make sure that the tools implemented in VGC Illustration can also work properly in the context of animation. That being said, I need a minimal set of features in VGC Illustration before I can even start working on VGC Animation, which is why I haven't started to work on VGC Animation yet.

Indeed, it seems more and more clear that the 3D View is in fact very helpful, not only for academic research (SIGGRAPH papers, etc.), but also for animating. Thanks for commenting on this, it adds one more voice in favor of keeping this view, and even improving it. I have myself found this view helpful recently, while working on an animation: it was useful to see the arcs of motion in 3D to be able to get smoother trajectories. Sometimes, onion skinning in the 2D View was the better visualization tool, but sometimes the 3D View was better, depending on the situation. Being able to directly pick/edit the vertices and edges in the 3D View would have been even better, I was sometimes frustrated not to be able to do it, so clearly that's something I'll keep in mind for VGC. In fact, I'd like to be able to smoothly transition between 2D and 3D within the same view with a button/shortcut, that would be super cool. In a nutshell, the main window could be split into several views (like you can do with 2D views in VPaint currently), and any of these views could be smoothly turned into a 3D view if desired at the press of a button. Again, that's the vision at least, it might still take a few years before we have that :)