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Work in Progress / Lightning Limbs v1.0

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Robert The Robot
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Posted: 12th Nov 2007 12:25 Edited at: 7th Dec 2007 10:15
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Latest News: Please see most recent posts...

The Sales Pitch
This program lets you load any .X or .3ds model and freely manipulate its limbs to create a smooth and realistic animation sequence with truly lightning speed. You can set and manipulate the models keyframes. You can load up to 1000 Props, to make your hero more versatile. Change which limb the knight's sword is glued to at a particular keyframe. And when you're finished animating, you can export your animation as a data file, or even export your entire animated model as part of a .X file (with no loss of quality at all!!)

Program Features:
(Key: Completed, In Progress, Not Started)

Select Limbs
Offset limb
Rotate Limb
Scale Limb
Set Keyframes
Delete keyframes
Edit Keyframes
Scale/Scroll Limb Textures

Load Props (But not in the demo )
Select Props
Offset Props
Rotate Props
Scale Props
Scale/Scroll Prop Textures

Glue Object to Limbs
Unglue Object

Export .X file
Export animation data file


Any comments or feedback would be greatfully appreciated.

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dark coder
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Posted: 12th Nov 2007 13:10
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Judging by the UI you must manually input positional and rotational values for the animations, as you've demonstrated 15mins for a single keyframe is far too long. To make the app far more useful you should at the least add support for move/rotate gizmos positioned at the limb's axis so users can easily animate it. Also I'm not sure if that "1" in the image to the bottom right indicates the current keyframe but your app should show an animation timeline for easier editing. Other vital features for an animation tool especially for a characters is the ability to have a backdrop image or more importantly a video. This way people could have their own manual mo-cap like system(only there is no mo-cap to it ) by rotating the character or whatever other item to a video for realistic animation results, I know first hand how hard it can be to make up a running animation .

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Robert The Robot
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Posted: 12th Nov 2007 14:11 Edited at: 12th Nov 2007 14:12
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Quote: "Judging by the UI you must manually input positional and rotational values for the animations"


I knew there was something I'd missed off the functionality list - whenever you select one or more limbs, you can click and drag to rotate them or use the keyboard arrow keys for more precision. It's actually a pretty poor screenshot, come to think of it - I'm showing off the camera toolbar (which has yet to be fully implemented) and not something more useful like the animation toolbar.

The Animation timeline sounds like a great idea, I'll get to work on that tonight as my current keyframe browser while OK makes things a little tedious...

Quote: "move/rotate gizmos positioned at the limb's axis"

I like the sound of that too, perhaps a little 3D object that points out which direction the X-, Y- and Z-axes go in so you know where to rotate.

A Backdrop image sounds good, too, I'll slip that in to the user settings menu. But I don't understand what you mean by videos, or a Mo-Cap type system. What does Mo-cap mean?

EDIT: Just had a thought, do you mean load a video in the background as reference material for your figure's animation?

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dark coder
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Posted: 12th Nov 2007 19:51
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Motion Capture, basically if you could set the background as someone running you could manually rotate all the limbs to match the current backdrop animation's limbs, then change the keyframe and the backdrop animation's frame for another part of the running animation until you have a pretty realistic animation. Obviously this isn't motion capture but if done right it can get similar results(for limb movement at least) in a fairly short amount of time.

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Robert The Robot
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Posted: 12th Nov 2007 21:04
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Ah, I see what you mean. I'll get working on that as well, sounds great...

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BiggAdd
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Posted: 12th Nov 2007 23:02 Edited at: 12th Nov 2007 23:02
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There is a thing called a Soft IK, might have been what darkcoder was touching upon.
Here is a video I made to sort of visually explain what is going on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-VqzuhV2wI

Basically it moves a series of limbs automatically when you move the node. The limbs bend towards a bias. Here is a diagram to show what I'm banging on about:

Its used for legs, arms, spines you name it. It greatly reduces the animation time.

Cheers,
BiggAdd


Its finally here!

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Robert The Robot
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Posted: 13th Nov 2007 14:23 Edited at: 13th Nov 2007 20:08
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Interesting, very interesting. I'd probably have to get the user to specify which limbs were to be linked, and then try and calculate what limb rotations were required to make the limbs meet the node at the end of them. Could be tricky, especially with 3D geometry, but I'm game for the challenge!

EDIT: Just to let you know, I've uploaded the Demo version of what I've got so far! Just pop up to the first post for the download link.

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Robert The Robot
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Posted: 15th Nov 2007 16:23
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Hi, I've been thinking about your suggestions for a node based animating system and I could do with bouncing a few ideas off people. I've been experimenting by setting up a node in each joint of a 3D figure (actually, I've just glued a sphere to each limb at 0, 0, 0), but I'm not sure if what I'm trying would be any good.



My idea is to let you click on a limb's node, and then rotate the limb in any direction you want, affecting all the limbs below it in the hierarchy. It might even be possible for me to make a child limb affect the parent limb, as in the Soft IK example, but that's a long way off yet.

I know that this kind of method would make manipulating limbs a lot faster than my current method but I don't know if it is the best method for animators to use. I'm not sure if the nodes are too big or if they're in the right places (the nodes at the knight's lower legs and knee-caps actually occupy exactly the same space!)

The nodes at the bottom of the knight's legs are actually the nodes for his feet - should they really be at at his toes, or would it be better to have them located centrally in each limb?

I'm not quite sure what direction I should be heading in, so a few comments on these ideas would be gratefully appreciated!

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Cash Curtis II
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Posted: 16th Nov 2007 09:24
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They should be at the joints and control the rest of the limb as kind of a pivot point. So the elbow joint would rotate the entire forearm at the elbow pivot. If you centrally located the elbow joint then you couldn't rotate it properly.

Also, I think you should have 4 viewports - 3 2D ones and 1 3D. This way you can accurately pivot limbs in a way that you could not in 3D space alone.


Come see the WIP!
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Robert The Robot
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Posted: 2nd Dec 2007 12:54
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After over a fortnight of hard work, I can now announce a new and greatly improved Demo version of Lightning Limbs is available for download!!! Get it here now: http://mythrada.distantstar.org.uk/limbs/lightning_limbs_demo.zip

I've fully implemented a nodal based animation system, and completed a kind of Soft-IK system. You can select a limb node, and when you reposition the node you can change the rotation of the two limbs above it! Using legs only, you can now fully animate a human walking sequence in a matter of minutes (I've always found arms a little trickier, but that's just me. I'm sure most peple would be quicker than me when it came to editing them!)

There are a few bugs in it, I know, but they shouldn't be too much of a problem. The only major one is that when you set up the limb cross-links the first four letters of the limb names are not displayed. Oops!

Also, I'm afraid that many of the features still haven't been implemented (they're the ones with no tool reminders).
Please be patient, and thanks in advance for taking a look.

I can't wait to hear what you have to say about this!

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Robert The Robot
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Posted: 7th Dec 2007 10:12 Edited at: 7th Dec 2007 10:12
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Hi, I'd just like to thank all the people who've been downloading my Demo versions - between the original version and the revised version (see above) I've had almost 50 downloads!!

But... would you be able to give me some feedback on them please?

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