[Bf-committers] RVKs improvements for CA (Using RVK in NLA)...

[Drew Yeaton]

This message was copied from a post on the forum. I don't know if it
was sent to bf-committers or not, but I wanted to make sure it was.
This is an excellent idea.

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We need vertex animation enclosed in "vertex actions", so we can mix
and match them with bone animations. Right now, RVK animations are
linked to the project timeline itself, and this way we cannot have say
a facial animation be diferent in two or more actions. The only way to
get it right now, as far as I can find, is by creating an entire new
scene (multiplying all the Objects in the file for every scene), or
making diferent proyects. Not very usefull.

This is also the case with constraints, also linked to the main
timeline in a way that makes more difficult to use them diferently in
every action.

And talking about RVKs, it would be also a great character animation
adition to have a way to link some vertex animation to the
transformations of a bone, like in Animation:Master "Smartskins": you
select a bone, say the forearm, and open a new action window where you
can rotate this bone and then retouch the deformation by moving and
arranging vertexes of the mesh. You do it at every angle you need to
controll the bending, and then close the smartskin window. The info of
this linked transformations (IPOS) remains stored in the model and,
from there, anytime you rotate this bone in a bone-action the mesh
reacts as you designed in the SmSk.

I know you can bulge a muscle right now in blender using an auxiliar
bone, but this kind of tools offers much more controll and efectivity.

Maybe now that programers are more focused on the animation
capabilities of Blender, we can get it working... as far as I can say,
Blender has all what is needed: RVK, bones and actions. We just need a
tool to manage their relations.

A great aproach would be to implement a more general purpose "Set
driven key" tool, which could be used to relate any two parameters in
an action, so you can control those relations by keyframing his
values. If we can get this working at the actions level, then we could
blend between several of them with NLA.

At the end, every kind of animatable channel (material, particles,
everything) should be able to be keyframed into an action, and then
mixed with other actions at the NLA global timeline.

I for one dream of it...  
Gustavo Muñoz

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Thanks,
Drew Yeaton
Sentinel Design Group
Xeet Street Inc.