Creature Pro Feedback

Discuss issues pertaining to the Creature Animation Editor here.
Aldwyns
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Feb 20, 2018 12:19 pm

Creature Pro Feedback

Post by Aldwyns » Wed Mar 07, 2018 4:25 pm

Hi Chong

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 :D
  1. 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.
  2. Allow use of arrow keys to move between mesh/bones in the list. Especially useful when checking skinning weights.
  3. Number fields give a lot of trouble. In Rigging mode, if you select a mesh and press the scale field:
    1. "Delete" deletes your selected mesh instead of the integers.
    2. "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.
    3. 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.
    4. The "-" button on the numpad does not work (At least on my langage keyboard)
  4. In Animate mode, if you select a bone and edit any field in the FK Motor:
    1. 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.
    2. It's even worse with the Keys/Knots Value, where you can't leave the lower bar with your mouse at all.
  5. "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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
These are problems I have that I haven't found a solution for yet.
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. How to have an ordered list continue with a previously ended number sequence in BBCode :lol:

And a little bug report:
  1. 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.
I hope the list wasn't too long, and I want to emphasis that this only me trying to help make a good piece of software even better!

Thanks for the hard work!

Sincerely
Jon

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

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by chong » Wed Mar 07, 2018 4:33 pm

Hello,

Those are excellent notes ( and the bug report! :) )

I will be looking through all of them and trying to address them in the upcoming updates. The list of issues will be addressed in a series of updates.
Thanks again for your hard work in writing up that useful report!

I might try to give you an option to Step/Clamp keys ( basically allow you to automatically alter the curves for a Stepping Curve ) to hold key poses for the next update. This should hopefully be helpful for you in your current assignment. I will also try to address a couple of the Quality of Life issues in the next update. ( Will address the ones I can fix immediately so that we can have quick iteration and you can get improvements in your hands much faster which I am sure you will appreciate :) )

Cheers

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

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by chong » Thu Mar 08, 2018 7:33 am

Hello,

I have addressed a number of your listed issues above. These include:

- I have added a new "Convert to Step Curve" function to the Animation Timeline Spline window. If you right-click or click on the "Step Curve" button on the toolbar, you will have the option to convert your current animation knot to a Step Curve timing motion

- Fixed the bug where pressing Delete will delete the region if you had your textbox already in focus and entering data. Now it just deletes the text as per normal

- Animation Mode text entering focus bug, the behavior should be improved now. If you are entering values and you mouse over the animation itself, you will still be able to enter text without losing focus.

I have sent you a PM via the forum for a download link to try out this test version. An official version with more fixes will be pushed out soon.

Cheers

Aldwyns
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Feb 20, 2018 12:19 pm

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by Aldwyns » Thu Mar 08, 2018 11:16 am

Thanks for the fast edits, this really is the best support I have ever encountered!

The Delete bug is confirmed to be fixed in this new build.

The Animation Mode text focus bug seems to be partially fixed. If I select the field and move the mouse into the main viewer, it will still work.
However if I then move into the Keys/Knots area, it stops working.
It then continues to not work if I go back in the main viewer, only to start working again when I go back in the Motors pane.

The Step-Curve I have a few issues with.
  1. It doesn't seem to be an adjustment of the curve to a 90 degree angle, but just a copy of the previous key placed the frame before the next with a linear interpolation. This has several problems:
    1. It can be fine for previews, but has issues in playback/render. If we choose to playback the animation at a lower framerate, there will be visible interpolation from one pose to the next. Also pausing the animation ingame could end up with a pose midway between two frames.
    2. If you change to step keys, and change back to linear or curve, the extra keys don't disappear. This changes the animation. If you press Step-Curve again, it also keeps adding more keys, even if they might not be needed. This means that if I choose to make a step key, I have to make sure to Undo it at once, if I regret it.
    3. If I make a new key in a Step-Key animation, and want to turn that one into a Step-Key as well, I have to press both Left and Right of Knot, because if I press All - I end up adding one more key to all knots in that curve.

      Ideally it should look like the bottom curve here with 90 degree angles:
      Image
  2. It is currently very cumbersome to select a knot from every curve individually and change them in the Spline window. Maybe in the Keys/Knots window we could change all the selected knots a the same time?
  3. Unless its a really long and detailed animation, just copy/pasting each key to the frame before the next one is currently faster.
  4. More keys means larger file sizes I assume? While probably barely noticeable, its not optimal. It also just looks more messy in your Keys/Knots and Spline window.
New Quality of Life ideas!
  • Some times it would be nice if you were able to define what kind keys you set. Toggle this, and all keys made from now on is Curve instead of Linear.
  • It would be nice if you could see on a knot in the Keys/Knots window, what kind of key it is.

    For reference, After Effects does it like this:
    Image
    They also have circles, arrows and other symbols.

Aldwyns
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Feb 20, 2018 12:19 pm

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by Aldwyns » Thu Mar 08, 2018 11:44 am

Another oddity I just noticed.
  • In the Spline Editor. If you drag a selection box, and end with the mouse outside the editor (like in the main work window), the selection box doesn't trigger on mouse release, but stays there until you click inside the editor again.
    If you then click inside the area of another graph, you still don't remove the selection, but change the size of it instead. This only happens if you are in Mode > All, and can see more than one graph at a time.
And some more QoL suggestions.
  • Mode > Focus should allow you to see the selected Filter(Like Angle) curves for all your currently selected objects, and not just one. Or this could be an additional Mode.
  • When in Mode > All, the Filter should be greyed out, to show it currently has no effect.
  • Allow stepping through keyframes with a keyboard shortcut, arrow keys or "," "."
  • In relation to that, allow for rebinding of hotkeys.

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

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by chong » Thu Mar 08, 2018 5:11 pm

Aldwyns wrote:
Thu Mar 08, 2018 11:16 am
T[*]It is currently very cumbersome to select a knot from every curve individually and change them in the Spline window. Maybe in the Keys/Knots window we could change all the selected knots a the same time?
[*]Unless its a really long and detailed animation, just copy/pasting each key to the frame before the next one is currently faster.
Hello,

For this issue I believe you can actually just drag a bounding box around the knots in the Spline WIndow to multiselect them. Then you can just group drag the Up and Down. This works and I just tried it.
Allow stepping through keyframes with a keyboard shortcut, arrow keys or "," "."
In Animation Mode, click on the Animate Drop down menu to see the full list of hotkeys. You can also bind hotkeys yourself in the preferences menu. These already include hotkeys to step forwards backwards ( including keyframes )

Regarding getting a formal Step Curve, that will take a bit more investigation. The other issues you raised will have to wait first while I investigate the Step Curve issue and see if I can find a reasonable solution to it since it is quite complicated.


Cheers

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

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by chong » Thu Mar 08, 2018 5:36 pm

Hello,

One more update. Actually there are a couple of issues:

- If you want perfect stepping even during playback in a Game Engine ( I assume ? ), one should be modifying the creature runtime instead. We can easily augment the runtime to not interpolate the animation to give you the step effect regardless of your playback speed.

- I will need to investigate to make the Step Function more optimal ( not adding knots ) to the animation curve.

So back the original question, what runtime are you using? I will be happy to point your devs at the code to make the required modifications for a step function.

Thanks

Aldwyns
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Feb 20, 2018 12:19 pm

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by Aldwyns » Thu Mar 08, 2018 6:05 pm

chong wrote:
Thu Mar 08, 2018 5:11 pm
For this issue I believe you can actually just drag a bounding box around the knots in the Spline WIndow to multiselect them. Then you can just group drag the Up and Down. This works and I just tried it.
I must be missing something then, I can't seem to multiselect past one motor at a time. What is this "group drag"?
This is where I am stuck:
Image
chong wrote:
Thu Mar 08, 2018 5:11 pm
In Animation Mode, click on the Animate Drop down menu to see the full list of hotkeys. You can also bind hotkeys yourself in the preferences menu. These already include hotkeys to step forwards backwards ( including keyframes )
Ah! I really should have looked in preferences before writing that :D
I didn't think the frame step options had shortcuts, because unlike all the others, it is not shown in the Animate dropdown menu.
chong wrote:
Thu Mar 08, 2018 5:36 pm
So back the original question, what runtime are you using? I will be happy to point your devs at the code to make the required modifications for a step function.
We are using Phaser for this game.
My programmer already managed to extract just the frames somehow, I'm home now so I will ask him how tomorrow.
When we tested it a few days ago, we planned to play the keys with a defined way in between, which would mean the timing was done in-engine.
Of course, I would much rather have the whole thing finished in creature, so I would know what I handed over, so what you say there sounds much better. As long as the animation looks the same both places I am happy :)

There has been some work to the Creature files working in Phaser, and the plugin seems to be a bit outdated and doesn't support meta.
We've been able to work around all of that so far though!

Good luck looking into the curve business, I believe in you! :P

-Jon

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

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by chong » Thu Mar 08, 2018 6:15 pm

Hello,

Yes the group drag is only for one motor right now, not multiple motors sorry. But it is intended to group select multiple knots in one Spline Curve and move them up and down as a group. The reason is because different motor parameters can potentially map to a different space ( stiffness versus your X/Y position. So moving groups of these curve parameters does not make sense and is potentially very dangerous )

All WebGL runtimes ( Phaser, PixieJS etc. ) use the same core:
https://github.com/kestrelm/Creature_WebGL

The core JS runtime library has already been updated with metadata support. This includes skinSwapping and events. Take a look at the PixieJS skinSwap sample:
https://github.com/kestrelm/Creature_We ... -Demo.html

It is very similar to Phaser and both use the same core runtime. I encourage you to download the latest runtime and use the same core for your Phaser game.

Regarding the curve type ( setting tangents to Step etc. ), what you are asking for is actually a lot more complicated to implement than it seems. It is not impossible but not something you should expect immediately for now. I think to get workable results in your current situation, I recommend getting the step function in place in the game engine approach. Again, you can get your programmer onto the forum and I will be happy to point out what code needs to be modified/added to get that working.

I think I will work on the other UI/UX issues first in the meantime. In particular, I will make text key inputs into the UI boxes much better ( so shift right arrow/left arrow selection + jump to start end via home/end will work )

Thanks

Aldwyns
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Feb 20, 2018 12:19 pm

Re: Creature Pro Feedback

Post by Aldwyns » Thu Mar 08, 2018 6:42 pm

That sounds perfectly reasonable!

Thanks for all the great help and advice.
I will send this to our programmer.

-Jon

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