Animation category

If an object/material/texture property is animated, (for example there is an ipo curve for Material RGB), then on the panel where the user usually sets that property (Materials panel) is grayed out or a darker shade as a visual cue.

If the user changes the property by moving the slider or entering a value, a popup window asks them if they want to establish a new key, or ignore the entry.

see http://wiki.blender.org/Requests

I know that's in a Blender plan already, but just for the record... :)

(camera shake)
A simple tool that appears in the camera panel where the user
can set intensity, duration, start, end, of a camera shake.

and maybe even a keyframe slider for the influence of this tool

this would be very useful for animating explosions, earthquakes, and other general environmental shaking events.

thanks...
I hate setting up softbodies and attaching cameras to the softbody to achieve the "shake" effect.

example:http://www.blendernation.com/2008/02/12/automatically-generated-camera- shaking/


*revision: could be implemented cleanly with a shake modifier*

something i think that would take Blender more over-the-top than it already is would be muscle, and perhaps even skin, simulation.

check out

http://www.cgcharacter.com/cgskin.html

http://cgtoolkit.com/muscletk.htm

When animating objects and armatures and going back to refine or eliminate some movements, I have often wished it was possible, within the 3D View, to bring up a menu where I could clear, selectively or completely, a keyed rotation, location, or scaling for an object or bone on the current frame.

Pressing ALT K could produce a menu for context appropriate key removal options, just as it happens inversely for settable keys after pressing the I KEY.

That is to say, if hovering over an object/bone, there would be the expected LocX/Y/Z/etc. key options (and possibly an All Keys option), while hovering over a material window produces the appropriate list of options (RGB/Alpha/etc.).

The result of such an action would be that key(s) selected by the user would be removed, if present on the current frame, from the corresponding IPO curve(s).

The current manual way we can do this is by going into an object's IPO and selecting multiple curves, entering edit mode for those curves, selecting the keys, and then deleting them.

This involves a number of steps (and at least one more if IPO window is not in current view setup) and much care when attempting to select the keys where complex actions (multiple keys in close proximity) are involved.

It is often necessary to zoom in to select certain keys, and, if vertical key positions in the curves are beyond the current IPO window, extra panning up/down is necessary to locate keys in order to select and delete them.

I believe the ease of being able to set a key in the 3D View via I KEY would be greatly complemented by an option to delete specific keys later via an ALT K KEY combination.

The animation workflow, for example, after main poses are blocked out and finer keyed motions/translations are keyed in later, could be substantially expedited and made easier by having the ability to delete keys without leaving the 3D View and hunt for IPO curves.

[....]

Maya does it, 3Ds max does it, XSI does it. Why ? Because it just works better than going to NLA editor and move dots around. You can skip alot of going back and forth from IPO to the NLA by having it all in the IPO Editor.

the possibility of reusing animations on different characters without much effort (also if they have different proportions and armatures) would be a huge time saver for many projects.

i know that motion retargeting is very difficult to do but i still hope that some genius(es) someday will work on this for blender. :)

programs like xsi, maya and motion builder support motion retargeting and it shouldn't be hard to find some example videos.

also features like offered in endorphin or euphoria would be great. i am not sure if bullet already would be powerful enough for something like that?

http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm

it would be very helpful if there were the option to always make IK targets snap back to the bone they are attached too after moving them. maya has this option.

it doesn't seem like this would be hard to add (but i have no clue about the ik code)? just solve the IK and if the IK target isn't positioned on the bone anymore after the mouse button gets released then set its position back to the bone? it should be an option.

edit:
the new "limit distance" contraint is very overcomplicated for this purpose. you need a helper bone to prevent cyclic dependency problems and it's very fiddly to set the right distance.

why not have a simple checkbox in the IK solver constraint for enabling a snap back like described?

howdy,

so right now, in most rigging tutorials, CTRL-N is held up as the default, all-powerful solution to making a great rig.

but all it does is align the orientation of bones axes to the WORLD'S AXES. but this is really only useful when your character is built in T-POSE (and for the sake of deformations later, this is NOT ideal). if the character is built with a "loose" position with arms at 45degs and bent at the elbows, orienting bone roll to world axes would cause problems.

in 2.46, we have the wonderful addition of orienting bone roll to 3D CURSOR! and basically, this will allow you to set a proper bone axis no matter the situation. so GREAT TOOL!

BUT, some tasks get done OVER AND OVER again and it would be nice to have it automated.

for ELBOWS and KNEES, one of the axes should aim down the bone (twist axis) and another should lie on the PLANE described by these three joints = (wrist, elbow, shoulder) or (ankle, knee, hip).

what this does is aligns the remaining axis to be oriented so that when the elbow or knee is bent, it bends IN ON ITSELF, instead of splaying out at an angle which is wrong. your forearm should fold into the bicep in a straight line like a pocket knife.

perhaps do it so that when CTRL-N is invoked when you have 3 joints selected, it applies "ELBOW/KNEE ORIENTATION" onto the last joint selected?

also, there should be a "FLIP" function too so that if X-AXIS is facing right, it can face left.... this is necessary if you have automated or expression driven rigs and you want the left side and right side to be proper mirror images and use the same values....

for an even more involved (!!! what?!) description of the issues involved, please see enclosed link to blender artists.

[....]

toggle armature visibility for rendering.

For those who just want to show their character and the armature in their animations.

Without extra work such as: modeling custom bones and childing them to the real bones of the armature.(specially if there is a couple hundred bones)

this would be nice if the same were done also for empties and lattices.

Now blender has an very basic text tool. it would be very nice if blender has the posibility to animate some parameters of the text like :
* Kerning / Tracking
* Random Rotation/Scale/Position for each letter

This is a mock-up i do for this propose:
http://pablo.lizardo.info/wp-content/uploads/text-ipo.png
link

I and many others i think would love to have real midi import functions , real audio to ipo.




I know there are scripts for that , but are not really accurate.

I may be asking too much , but if you would integrate midi , it would be cool to add LFO's , some kind bpm clock would really rock.

Midi can be tranlated to ipo's or trigger actions.

Do you think this could be implemented in blender ?

Thread in blender artists http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=78403&highlight=midi+import+sc ript

I would like to Record mouse movements in the 3D windows, when the animation is playing.

It wouldn't even be necessary to create a shortcut or function. Actually, I can drag objects when the timeline is running, and if Automatic Keyframes is ON, the keyframes are created! but the 'mouse capture' is not possible across frames because the playback pauses each time you grab an object. So the real new feature would be: NOT pausing the playback when dragging things, and adding the keyframes as needed.

Currently, blender has this CTRL-R - record mouse movement in the Ipo window. You can map the mouse to XY curves or XZ curves. It's not very useful because you are restricted to 2 planes, you don't really have a mouse-object visual coordination, and the aspect ratio and strength of your movements depend on the zoom on the IPO window. So I haven't used it very much.

The other way, believe me, would be real useful. I used that a lot in other app, animating 'by hand' and then cleaning up.

After Effects also has something like this called 'motion sketch'.

I'm sure this has been discussed over and over but I can not stress how important it is for adjusting IPO curves to have Euler rotations and not Quaternion. I understand that this would be a very large project but it is worth the work. The current workflow of just setting more keys to adjust the ease ins and outs of motion is just too much of a mess. The 3d medium becomes inefficient that way. It should be used to the best of its abilities, and that would be the ability to use as few key frames as it takes to make it look good. This allows for quick revisions of timing without having to delete the extra keys. Is it possible to have the face value of the IPO editor to look like euler but under the hood working like quats?

I'd like a 'Dynamic' constraint, usually to be applied on bones. It is a 'fake soft body'.

The constraint would just make the bone tend to stay in its position (inertia), accelerating to reach its new position, then oscillating after reaching it (as if the bone had a rubber joint).

Better to explain with images:

http://www.moscafilms.com.br/emilioleroux/blender/dynamicbone.mov


On its simpler form, the constraint would not need a target. Just:

STIFNESS -how stiff the bone acts. How quick or how lagged it will spring to the target rotation

DAMPING - the tendency to stop oscillation more quickly. (A theorethic damping of 0% would make things oscillate forever in real life. That's why cars have dampers)


It would be incremented by other options:

DRAG - something like 'air density', which would make the motion be slower, like underwater -or undersyrup-, without messing with physics.

GRAVITY - an additional value that would try to pull dynamic bones to the world's 'down' axis.


With the advent of pyConstraints, I grew excited and started the project, but now I see I am both new to python and blender, and also my math is very poor. I am willing to work on it, tho, but I need help (or, more honestly speaking, i could help someone).


[....]

ie. copy an objects position in 5 frames time

I'm making an animation with an aeroplane and it would be really useful if I could track-to the aeroplane's position in the next frame, so that the aeroplane is facing where its going. This would prevent so much manual adjustment and save a lot of time.

This can probably be done with a python script, but would be easier to use as a constraint property.

So you could make a two empty object with cube centered in middle of them...
Practical example..
You would have two objects - shoulders and hips...and in the middle of them would be controller of stomach area which would be positioned in constant relation between shoulders and hips...
Or you can define a plain by 3 points in the space...
Also good for rigging a complex characters....

In some newer games like the upcoming Star Wars the Force Unleashed they have integrated a new physics system(Digital Molecular Matter)for handling the behavior of different materials like wood, metal, glass and many more , so that the material behaves like it would in real life: wood breaks and splinter ,metal bends and gets dented ,glass cracks and shatters etc.

Perhaps you could assign the the material physics to vertex groups so that you can have different material physics and smooth transitions between them on the same mesh or it could be applied with the standard materials instead(perhaps putting the settings into the DYN tab) I don't know if they are good options on how the system should be handled in the Blender ui just suggestions i thought up writing this.

Anyway here is a video showing it in action: http://youtube.com/watch?v=bE4k9Vmcp5g unfortunately I couldn't find the longer version i have seen earlier so it only shows wood breaking.

Unfortunately i have very little coding experience and know that this is a very large undertaking but i thought i should at least mention it.

:)

The ability to position markers in space with names for easier access than snapping the cursor, then the selection, to everything. Populate a submenu in the snap-to menu with markers already used. Could also populate existing objects in this (would have to be hierarchy or would get full quick).

Then if I wanted to move anything to a location that is used repeatedly, I just click on it then snap-to directly.

Ability to snap to the edge of nearby objects while moving or scaling items. Would make it easier to place e.g. multiple items on a table or floor.