I have been using Creature for 2 weeks now, and wanted to give some feedback.
After an initial setup and learning period, I am really enjoying how easy it is to output from Creature!
I am also amazed at how fast you seem to reply to questions and even patch the software. Very impressive.
For reference:
I usually work in 3D software from Autodesk(Maya, Motionbuilder, 3DS Max) or 2D from Adobe(Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere).
Currently i am working on a 2D game in Phaser, and we decided to use Creature for that purpose.
I am used to working traditionally on animation, with hand posing and animation.
I am working in Creature Pro via DeepMotion on Windows 10 with a Danish keyboard setup.
Most of these are Quality of Life improvements suggestions, on things that have been bugging or confusing me
- Make Creature the active program when clicked, even if it has another window open (such as add motor or choose anim). I often open a folder or browser in the middle of my screen, and then I have to more my window to click the dialogue or the dialogue in the task bar.
- Allow use of arrow keys to move between mesh/bones in the list. Especially useful when checking skinning weights.
- Number fields give a lot of trouble. In Rigging mode, if you select a mesh and press the scale field:
- "Delete" deletes your selected mesh instead of the integers.
- "Tab" doesn't skip to the next field, but makes what looks like a space, after which no buttons works, and then you can't press "Enter" or "Escape" to finish editing it either.
- If you type a number and dont press "Enter", but select another piece of mesh instead, this applies all the values of the first mesh to the newly selected mesh.
- The "-" button on the numpad does not work (At least on my langage keyboard)
- In Animate mode, if you select a bone and edit any field in the FK Motor:
- The field only recognises your inputs, while you hover the mouse over that part of the UI. This had me confused for hours until I noticed why I sometimes couldn't type anything.
- It's even worse with the Keys/Knots Value, where you can't leave the lower bar with your mouse at all.
- "Enable Image Swap" highlights when you click the text, but doesn't enable/disable, which confused me for a good while. Make it either not highlight at all, or work on clicking the text.
- In the Keys/Knots window, the mouse scroll wheel seems to move a % of the slider in the side, meaning if I only have a few bones selected it scrolls incredibly slowly, but if I select a lot, it goes much faster.
- In Animate mode, when trying to drag the animation slider at the top, if you click the round button it doesn't seem to work, only if you click the actual slider can you drag it.
- When you Animate a bone with mesh that has its scale value changed with a "Simple Transform Motor", it scales if you rotate the bone. It only seems to be a problem if the bone has rotational animation over time.
- I am missing the option to set Step/Clamp Keys. Both for initially setting up poses and timing, and animation where you want to jump from one pose to the next instantly. My current project calls for a very choppy animation style, and we are forced to prevent inbetweens in the game engine, since I can't control the curves in Creature. That means I can't preview the final animation in Creature, which makes the whole thing a bit cumbersome.
- How to have an ordered list continue with a previously ended number sequence in BBCode
And a little bug report:
- I had changed the Region Order in Animate, and afterwards went back and duplicated that mesh, and moved it where I wanted it. When I then wen't back in an animation that had a change to its Region Order, Creature would instantly crash.
Thanks for the hard work!
Sincerely
Jon