[Bf-taskforce25] NLA system thoughts

[Mango Jambo]

Hi,

Have 3 questions/features request/sugestions about the new NLA:
-NLA like animation layers
Animating Yo Frankie, I did try to enalbe NLA with a Walk action for example
and add / edit another mixed action. The problem was when I move some bone,
it get weird moves, like doubling, or sum of 2 mixed action, I don't know. I
was thinking to make it like animation layers, non-destructive way: little
changes, but preserving the main action (walk in this example). But if NLA
will work like VSE, wow! Mixing possibilities like add, subtract, etc, will
be a big step. I like what William said about animators work flow. I just
wanna add the possibility to create an action, mix it with a main one and
than edit it to make the changes. I don't know if WIlliam said the
possibility to edit an action separately or like I said, but would be a
great feature;

- baking NLA into an action;
After that, the possibility to bake the NLA into an action. It looks a
simple thing, I don't know. Maya does it really bad, inserting key frames on
EVERY single frame!! Impossible to make changes after!

- Objects animation on action;
It is more like a doubt and may be a feature request.Today actions works
only for armatures. The new Graph Editor and Dope Sheet rocks!! But, how it
will works with the NLA? Will be possible to add objects animation from Dope
Sheet like the armature actions? For example: I am animating a man carring a
tray with fruits, something like 20 fruits. There is some shots, and I was
thinking about to make some simple cycles to make my job faster. The
possibility to set one action for all the fruits and the tray (like it being
a character), could be great. I know I can do an armature to make it
possible today, but what do you think to make  a set of object a new
character ( or by group, I don't know) and that new "character" (without
armature) could have the actions for those objects like for armatures? Is
that a good idea or no, if we need a character set, work with armatures.




Moraes Junior - aka mangojambo
3D Artist Animator


2009/3/7 Joshua Leung <aligorith at gmail.com>

> 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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