suggestions on the animation ui-

Discuss issues pertaining to the Creature Animation Editor here.
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furrfire
Posts: 76
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 4:33 am

suggestions on the animation ui-

Post by furrfire » Mon May 14, 2018 10:02 pm

Loving creature still- but after using it a while I have some simple suggestions I'd like to throw out, my apologies if it's already been suggested in the past, or already planned for a future update.

ANIMATION SCREEN UI---

On the animation screen, when I first load up creature *or closed and restarted* it's annoying to always have to turn on loop animation. Shouldn't this be on by default? Does anyone actually prefer this to be play once by default upon startup?

Then when trying to drag the timeline circle between the animation start and end frame, it can be tricky to actually grab where needed to scrub through my animation, with me often having to click multiple times to finally get it to drag with the mouse. I would suggest making the circle grab area larger, and there is visually plenty of space there to do that on the UI i feel.
Perhaps even more annoying- if I move the mouse pointer too high up or down while moving left and right, it stops moving the time. TRY IT OUT- grab the little circle and drag it left and right to go through your animation, while doing this slide your mouse down and you'll see it stops working, until you move closer to the drag bar again. Windows does this too, I think they call it scroll bar hotspots, and I never did like that. Is it possible to make creature not do that? Again not a major issue, a minor annoyance type of thing. ;)


The zoom level of the animation timeline-- I would like to see this save to whatever zoom level I last used it at, for that particular animation.

Sprite swapping with the sprite manager-- I keep forgetting to go to frame 0 before doing this and then find out my item I swapped to something else pops in and out while playing the animation. Maybe have a new ui element that says what frame is currently selected as a friendly reminder?





REVERSE ANIMATION- I don't see a way to reverse the animation? I ran into a situation where an existing animation could do something I wanted near perfectly in reverse for a different animation where I would make a few changes but otherwise be good to go. Reversing in unreal is easy, but how to do this in creature while animating?
EDIT-12-16-2020- I finally figured out a good way to perfectly reverse your animations. Just use the pose capture library and save a pose at each time you have an animation knot. Save them and give them a number to indicate which time they should be used at. This is simple enough if you have few different times with animation knots, but will be really time consuming if you have many and I also don't know how well it will work with custom motors and their settings (hopefully I never need to find out).



Non of these suggestions or issues are incredibly important, and maybe there is good reasons not to function in the ways requested for good reasons I haven't thought of, either way keep up the good work. ;)
Last edited by furrfire on Thu Dec 17, 2020 4:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

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

Re: suggestions on the animation ui-

Post by chong » Mon May 14, 2018 11:11 pm

Hello,

These are all decent suggestions. I will see what I can do, a couple of them I can definitely address for the next update :)

Cheers

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

Re: suggestions on the animation ui-

Post by furrfire » Wed May 16, 2018 5:32 am

glad to hear it!

One other thing I ran into today-- pushing return on the numpad should work just like enter, but instead it puts an r down instead when entering numbers manually for various motor settings.

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