anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

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furrfire
Posts: 76
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 4:33 am

anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

Post by furrfire » Sat Oct 20, 2018 2:18 am

(UPDATE- With the latest patch both requests I made here are in and working. Thank you Chong for this, and it didn't take years to get these improvements. I only wish I had this kind of excellent support in other apps I use. :lol:
For those of you who might be confused on where the new option to animate to closest point is- it's high up top- the top of the window bar- click on animate and you'll find it on the drop down list (set FK angles to closest rotation)







Hi Chong. I'm finally back to animating so expect me to bother you with requests and questions again :mrgreen: - just a couple quick quality of life suggestions here for ya today- nothing dire- they'd just make the program a little easier to use imo.

RATIONAL ROTATION---

Rotating anything beyond 180 degrees can cause the animated part to rotate in the wrong direction. Even if you put a part to 179 degrees then a little bit later on the timeline put it to -175- your part will always spin clockwise, when it should just go counter clockwise as that would be the closest way to reach that point.
I know how to manually type in the degrees to prevent this thus forcing a counter clockwise rotation in animation, but it sure would be nice if I didn't need to type that in, and just have it work properly like it would in flash animation.



A BONE TO PICK---

The next issue is BONE PICKING in animation screen-
I have a bunch of bones overlapping sometimes in my animations- I zoom in to make sense of it all- then try to click just the bone I want. I click exactly on that bone- but somehow I end up selecting a bone that isn't even under my mouse pointer, not even close. This generous give might make it easier to not miss and select a body part- but 99% of the time I find myself wishing it would just be pixel perfect- so that if I wanted to select a bone I must have my mouse pointer on that bone. I would rarely even need to make use of the bone list to select exactly the bone I wanted then and I'd be a happy animator- because when you have a large bone list to dig through... it's tedious.
Last edited by furrfire on Fri Nov 16, 2018 9:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

Post by chong » Sat Oct 20, 2018 5:15 pm

Hello!

For the rotation part, it's sort of a double-edged sword right now. If you want to animate a spinning wheel ( mechanical part ) for instance, the current scheme works very well since you can just key a tiny angle, then a super large one some frames later and it all works with just 2 knots.
For your case, it does not. I am thinking if a new mode can be added to the typical FK motor so that it can respond to either closest angle or the standard angle interpolate scheme ( so we can cater to both needs ). Will investigate further on this.

For bone selection, you might want to consider Bone Groups ( if you are on the Windows version, Mac version update will come in a bit ). Go to Animate -> Bone Groups and then you can custom select and make your own Bone Groups. This is what a lot of users do when animating for very complex characters with tons of bones. Had a user with a character having 800+ bones ( yes Creature can handle tons of bones ) and he made specific bone groups for different parts. That way you can quickly select which ever group of bones you want. You can make a group with say 5 bones, when yous select it, it shows up in the Anim Knots view. Then you can individual select the bone you want by just clicking on the bone in that view.

Cheers

furrfire
Posts: 76
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 4:33 am

Re: anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

Post by furrfire » Sun Oct 21, 2018 12:04 pm

I never tried that bone groups option before- that's pretty handy- I like it.
That will certainly help, but I would still like to see the mouse pointer be accurate- so if I click on my arm bone- it doesn't select a chest bone that wasn't even under the mouse pointer (but was nearby). If there is a good reason to not have it behave like this- maybe make it an option we can toggle on or off (precise bone selecting)-

Another way to achieve this would be to--
Add a button to hold down for precision picking a bone. For example- hold down mouse 2 then left click to pick exactly the bone your mouse pointer is on-or highlights and toggles which bone is selected if there is multiple nearby.

I feel mouse 2 would be good for this because it doesn't really do much besides panning on the animation workspace window. You could also consider mouse wheel click or mouse 3.

I hope these suggestions are useful and have a good day. ;)





also-- wow... that's a lot of bones. I think my head would explode if I tried to manage even 400! :lol:

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

Post by chong » Sun Oct 21, 2018 5:21 pm

Hello,

Yes indeed, I will investigate improving the bone selection algorithm and make it more accurate.
Let me spend some time to see what is possible.

Thanks

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

Post by chong » Sun Oct 21, 2018 7:43 pm

Ok good news, much improved and accurate bone selection will be in for the next update.

Cheers

furrfire
Posts: 76
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 4:33 am

Re: anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

Post by furrfire » Mon Oct 22, 2018 9:01 am

Well, that takes care of one of my requests here and I'm pretty happy to hear that. Thank you! :D
So I no longer have a "bone to pick". Now just a bone to spin- the right way- :lol:

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

Post by chong » Mon Oct 22, 2018 4:44 pm

The bone picking update will be published first with the upcoming update.
For your rotation spinning request, a new mode will be looked into. The issue as I explained before is your request covers just one case of usage, the current rotational behaviour works for cases where you want to easily animate a spinning wheel/spinning fan etc. over large angles ( 0 to say 1000 degrees etc. ) So 2 modes will need to be added to the FK Motor, one to do the current and the other to perform the closest angle ( what your request entails ). It is definitely possible, just need to investigate what is the most streamlined method to implement it. But the bone picking fix will be first implemented the next update.

Cheers

furrfire
Posts: 76
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 4:33 am

Re: anim- rotation beyond 180 degrees issue- and bone selection suggestion

Post by furrfire » Thu Oct 25, 2018 1:51 pm

Sounds good.

Also- I could write a long speech about just how much I love the bone picking improvement- I get the right bone every click, it's faster and slicker to get animation done now and feels much more natural. Probably my fav QOL improvement so far, so thank you very much again for that. 8-)

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