[Feature Request] Colored Pie Weighting

Discuss issues pertaining to the Creature Animation Editor here.
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gamedevcouple
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue May 09, 2017 6:06 pm

[Feature Request] Colored Pie Weighting

Post by gamedevcouple » Tue May 09, 2017 6:08 pm

Hello!

We are an indie studio considering subscribing for multiple licenses of your fantastic software, having tried puppet2d, dragonbones and spine.

The only thing that is stopping us is the weighting system, currently we feel it is very unintuitive for an animator in its current form.

Would it be possible for you to add a colored pie version of the weighting? As in each vertex on the mesh shows a pie that shows colors for all the bones weighted to it?

This is the way industry standard applications such as Spine and Dragonbones use, and the puppet2d author has added this feature recently (update to store pending review).

This method of weighting is very intuitive as it allows us to see all the bones weighted to a point/area at once, also this would allow transferable skills from the other 3 programs to be used in your program.

This rather easy to implement addition would increase the sales potential of your program as you would have the final piece of the puzzle that the other programs have. With colored pie weighting your program would blow the competition away!

We really hope you take our request into account, as I believe this could be the feature holding many other Spine animators from jumping ship to your (what could be superior!) program!

Thanking you in advance for your time and look forward to hearing from you!

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

Re: [Feature Request] Colored Pie Weighting

Post by chong » Tue May 09, 2017 8:29 pm

Hello,

Thank you for your interest in the Creature Animation Tool! So the weight display for Creature is more like the ones you see in Maya or Houdini. It is designed to deal with much more complex rigs where you have tons of bones. It is not unusual for example, to have a tail part alone that has > 20 bones. There are characters in Creature rigs that have over 80 to 100 bones. Also in general, Creature meshes are quite complex unlike other tools since Creature is 100% mesh based. You are typically dealing with much denser and more detailed meshes.
In such scenarios, having a pie chart per vertex will not be practical. The auto weighting algorithms in Creature are also very robust and they will not fail to run ( unlike other tools in certain cases ) Having said that, we will definitely look into ways to improve the weight display for our rigging portion :)

Cheers

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