[Bf-taskforce25] NLA system thoughts

[Joshua Leung]

Hi,

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 9:45 PM, William Reynish <william at reynish.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
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 :)


> 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.
>
Hmm... this is an interesting approach...


> 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.
>
Sounds quite sane...


> 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
>

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.

Joshua
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