[Bf-taskforce25] NLA system thoughts

[William Reynish]

On 6 Mar, 2009, at 11:26 AM, Joshua Leung wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Nathan Vegdahl <nathanvegdahl at gmail.com 
> > wrote:
> 1) The NLA editor should be, ideally, extremely similar to the
> sequence editor.  There really isn't any reason to have the two
> interfaces be particularly different, or to have the user interact
> with them any differently.  Therefore: why not use the same UI code?
> This unifies the user experience greatly, and reduces coding work both
> now and in the future.  Only very small changes would need to be made
> to accommodate NLA editing.
> Certainly there can be a great amount of overlap between the two.  
> However, where this idea breaks down is when you start trying to  
> figure out which 'Object' or datablock the strips belong to. Perhaps  
> this is why you proposed the single scene-level action?

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.

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.

I imagine the workflow for animation mixing to be like this:

1: The animator creates an animation on say, a character, animating  
bones, materials, shape keys.

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 belong to anything - it's just animation over time.

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.

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.

5: The animator pulls up the NLA Editor, which has the library of  
clips available.

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 source 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.

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: http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/tour/animation.aspx


Cheers!

-William
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