Hi,<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 9:45 PM, William Reynish <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:william@reynish.com">william@reynish.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style=""><div>Well, isn't the point of the 'everything is animatable' paradigm also that you can mix any collection of f-curves? You might want to make a clip out of two characters, or include material f-curves together with the bone animation when mixing.</div>
</div></blockquote><div>Hmm... perhaps you're proposing to have this more widespread than I thought would be necessary. Either that, or I wasn't clear in my reply earlier. However, the system supports it either way :)<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div style=""><div></div><div></div><div>The basic idea of an animation mixer is simple: You mix and sequence strips together. The strips can be any type of animation, ie. any collection of F-Curves.<br>
<div><br></div></div>I imagine the workflow for animation mixing to be like this:<div><br></div><div>1: The animator creates an animation on say, a character, animating bones, materials, shape keys.</div><div><br></div><div>
2: In the Graph Editor and Dopesheet, the animator can see all the F-Curve channels in the same list, and edit them together. In a sense, the F-Curves don't <i>belong</i> to anything - it's just animation over time. </div>
<div><br></div><div>3: The animator specifies some channels he/she would like to store into a clip. These channels optionally have the F-Curves removed from the main timeline.</div></div></blockquote><div>Hmm... this is an interesting approach...<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div style=""><div></div><div></div><div>4: The animator repeats the above, until there is a small library of clips. Not all the clips include the same F-Curve channels, but that's okay. </div>
<div><br></div><div>5: The animator pulls up the NLA Editor, which has the library of clips available. </div><div><br></div><div>6: He/she can now chain the clips together, scale them, loop them, overlap them, add transitions from one to another. If he/she wants to edit the <i>source</i> data of any of the clips, there will be a way to enter any clip and edit it, and then jump back out and see the big picture.</div>
</div></blockquote><div>Sounds quite sane...<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div style=""><div></div><div></div>
<div>If you are interested in seeing how XSI, which has probably the best implementation on animation mixing to date, deals with this, check out the videos here: <a href="http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/tour/animation.aspx" target="_blank">http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/tour/animation.aspx</a> </div>
</div></blockquote><div><br>BTW, I should mention that much of my current ideas regarding NLA are based upon a combination of Softimage's Mixer, the recent Animation Layers popularisation, and the observation that quite a few people were using NLA not to create libraries of clips, but rather to animate in an Animation Layers fashion. They would usually insert keyframes in a new strip + layer it on top of an existing one, then scale it, and keep inserting keyframes... That's why I am kindof interested to the explore the possibility of having a hybrid NLA + animation-layers functionality, where the active action acts as a 'tweaking track' (i.e. the active layer, with keyframes only being able to be added into such a track.<br>
<br>Joshua<br></div></div><br>