This one has come up before I'm sure. It would be nice to see but it would increase the creation time greatly if we had to do a direction/animation pass for every joint.

I would firstly like to see all upper body animations available for both sitting and standing modes. It's really annoying when you go to animate a character doing something and discover that the action is greyed out because he is sitting down and it is a standing animation!
In addition to this it would be nice if we could have the option to freeze one arm during character direction and freeze the other for a second direction. Yes, I know that another timeline would be required for the additional limb direction but the advantage of this system would be a substantial increase in the variety of animations possible purely from combining the existing ones and also, when we do reach the stage where characters can hold objects,this will allow us to animate without the dreaded greyed out experience which I assume would be the order of the day if we retain the existing pose restricted choices.
...or worse! We CAN use all the animations when they are holding objects and the spear holding character starts moving both arms all over the place cause he's performing a conversation animation.

Thoughts on this anyone?

Edit: There is one extra move I'd like to see.
..head tilt!
The head can move up and down and side to side and everything in between but the ability to tilt the head to one side isn't there!
It's amazing the emotion that can be conveyed from this simple movement.
Yip, head tilt please!

Cheers
D
edited by Dreeko on 30/05/2012

This one has come up before I'm sure. It would be nice to see but it would increase the creation time greatly if we had to do a direction/animation pass for every joint.

I would firstly like to see all upper body animations available for both sitting and standing modes. It's really annoying when you go to animate a character doing something and discover that the action is greyed out because he is sitting down and it is a standing animation!
In addition to this it would be nice if we could have the option to freeze one arm during character direction and freeze the other for a second direction. Yes, I know that another timeline would be required for the additional limb direction but the advantage of this system would be a substantial increase in the variety of animations possible purely from combining the existing ones and also, when we do reach the stage where characters can hold objects,this will allow us to animate without the dreaded greyed out experience which I assume would be the order of the day if we retain the existing pose restricted choices.
...or worse! We CAN use all the animations when they are holding objects and the spear holding character starts moving both arms all over the place cause he's performing a conversation animation.

Thoughts on this anyone?

Edit: There is one extra move I'd like to see.
..head tilt!
The head can move up and down and side to side and everything in between but the ability to tilt the head to one side isn't there!
It's amazing the emotion that can be conveyed from this simple movement.
Yip, head tilt please!

Cheers
D
edited by Dreeko on 30/05/2012

Perhaps we could have an option to manually move the limbs, similar to the eye and head movement. Elbows, shoulders and fingers, that is all we really need for now...
Do you agree?

I would firstly like to see all upper body animations available for both sitting and standing modes.

In addition to this it would be nice if we could have the option to freeze one arm during character direction and freeze the other for a second direction.

when we do reach the stage where characters can hold objects,this will allow us to animate without the dreaded greyed out experience which I assume would be the order of the day if we retain the existing pose restricted choices.

...or worse! We CAN use all the animations when they are holding objects and the spear holding character starts moving both arms all over the place cause he's performing a conversation animation.

..head tilt! The head can move up and down and side to side and everything in between but the ability to tilt the head to one side isn't there!

Jamie!
What do you think of the limb freezing idea?

Separation of upper and lower body animations is the logical next step and would help enormously. Also separation of head and body animations - i.e. I want to point forward but with a sad face. Again a much simpler task for the Devs than individual finger animation, but would give us so much more with the animations we already have.

Dreeko wrote:


Err.. I don't follow what you mean here. Hmm?

Possibly this is actually making things more complex? It's certainly one of the challenges with character and object interactions. How does a character hold all the different things it possibly could and be animated in ways that look good and suitable? On the other hand, maybe that crazyness is the effect someone wants in their movie?

Dreeko wrote:


Yeah, that really does bug me as well.

Dreeko wrote:


Interesting one Dreeko. Not sure how freezing one arm would work - I guess it'd have to be the character's current mood's idle animation for the "un-animated" arm

Dreeko wrote:


Err.. I don't follow what you mean here. Hmm?

Dreeko wrote:


Possibly this is actually making things more complex? It's certainly one of the challenges with character and object interactions. How does a character hold all the different things it possibly could and be animated in ways that look good and suitable? On the other hand, maybe that crazyness is the effect someone wants in their movie?

Dreeko wrote:



Now that is an interesting one. It could be very useful.

Jamie wrote:


All I meant was - A limb freeze (or left and right arm timeline option) would allow us to animate without being prevented from doing so (ie greyed out) due to the chosen animation being unsuitable because the character is holding an object.
Jamie wrote:

Weight slider.....
Size slider....

Dreeko wrote:



I've thought about this size and weight slider a fair bit and I just can't see how it'd be a practical solution. The problem I see is with how would these properties affect things.

Ok, it's easy to imagine that a heavy object would mean the characters arms are not as high as they would be with a light object and that a larger object would cause the arms to move further away from the rest of the body to accommodate the larger size.

The weight aspect seems unneeded. If you had a super hero, you'd expect that even the heaviest of objects to be handled effortlessly and a wimp character to struggle with the lightest thing, so over all that'd be covered with the animations chosen for the situation the character is in. If you had to go through each object attach to the character and setup the weight of it for the right effect it might be a bit time consuming and easy to get the wrong results without realising.

There is a size slider already, we call it scale. The problem, I see anyway, is with the technology. How could the animation be changed, on the fly, to suit different sizes? If you have a really massive object (a 1980's mobile phone, for example) you'd still expect the character to place it at it's ear but the animation would need to be adjusted to allow the hand to be further away from the ear to allow space for the phone, which in turn means a different angle on the elbow joint and in turn a different angle on the shoulder joint and possibly a different angle on several other joints to make the holding action look right. A weird situation might be the character holding a large, heavy box over it's head, both hands would need to be used and you wouldn't be able to just have the arms go as low as the weight would suggest, due to the rest of the body below.

Ok, that's all a bit garbled but I think there is a more elegant solution to be found, that gives a simpler interface without causing to much extra things for users to do. I'm not against size or weight sliders if there's a practical plan on how it'd work, but it might be worth one of the animators or devs confirming if that sort of thing is possible with the technology we're using.

I do see how the points that you raise could make the weight slider impractical.

Perhaps a height slider for the arms would be a better solution. That way you could just adjust the arm/s from over head to held out front to down by the side and the object scale slider would still cope with the other aspect of whether it was a small object requiring only one hand or a large one requiring two.

Thanks for your interest on this btw

Cheers
D