akeytsu, an innovative 3D program dedicated to animation
Developed by nukeygara, akeytsu is a brand new 3D program dedicated solely to character animation and rigging, for the animation and video games industries.
simplicity, velocity and ergonomics
With its artistic-oriented approach, akeytsu breaks up classic standards of current broad-based solutions by providing a new workflow built on simplicity, velocity and ergonomics.
Artistic tools used to be conceived by engineers, thus demonstrating a level of complexity inconsistent with artist users. This time is over.
“We will give power back to artists with software fitting to them.”
They will easily find their bearings because it is designed specifically for their needs.
The first things I notice are an apparent overlay of F-curves on top of the viewport and some large fancy widget.
Though I guess we till need to wait what SIGGRAPH conference goers think to determine if it’s going to be as big a breakthrough in animation as anticipated. Though it looks like on the website they might already have something interesting with their new IK solving system and stacker widget.
So, you’ll have a sort of virtual mouse that you control with your real mouse to rotate the body around? Hmm, I’m no expert, but that doesn’t seem very comfortable …
Yeah, it seems that rigging and animation workflows haven’t evolved much since I started animating in the early 2000’s with Animation Master. Of course AM was way ahead of its time in that respect and had NLA, smartskin and the auto rigs (Setup Machine) before other packages.
When you consider the evolution of modelling via Zbrush, 3dCoat etc and rendering tech (Octane, Arnold, Cycles, Redshift), it is a bit sad to look at the current state of rigging. Some of the inhouse tools of R&H with the Voodoo tech and the recent videos of Dreamworks/Pixars animation tools do point in a positive direction. We just need those sort of workflows available in mainstream packages. Not sure what is happening with Voodoo, as the recent hype seems to have died. Maybe something will be revealed at Siggraph?
Looks similar to Sega’s Animanium, also a really neat animation tool. Never got any traction in the market either, but it was really sleek and well designed.
The idea of selecting body parts directly without having to display or select the underlying bones is great. Pixar’s Presto lets you do that too. Would be great to have such a feature in Blender. Bones can be visually distracting, and hard to select when inside character meshes.
Akeytsu is available for public only since two weeks.
It is kind of hard to expect a revolution in the 3D market when majority of programs even most amazing tools like ZBrush had to be developed for years till they got the critical mass and took the crown of being the industry standard.
Many artists will also wait with using or trying it out, till a critical mass of people are already using it and making kick ass stuff with it…
additionally how the company updates the tool and many other factors for being unsure/reluctant as an artist to try out a new tool.
In the meantime, there is a free beta as well as 14 video tutorials available which are for free, a manual and a fresh and new forum available.
MODO 901 now has Command Regions. The way it works is that you can set any polygon selection as a Command Region and redirect it to the rig controls you want to affect, as well as activate any MODO command you want upon clicking that Command Region.
For example, you can select all the polygons of an upper arm and set it as a Command Region that then directs to the upper arm control and automatically activates the rotate tool. The animator doesn’t have to see any locators, controls or joints anymore - simply click on the mesh parts they want to animate.
This video demonstrates it briefly in the beginning:
I think it’s brilliant and I’m already using it with great joy in my MODO rigs.
Re: Akeytsu - I’ve tried the beta but it goes completely crazy when I try to navigate the viewport. I use a Wacom tablet and don’t even have a mouse here at work. Their website says this:
I tried the suggested setting in the Preferences but nothing changed. For now this is unusable for me.
I’m very interested in it and really want to see more innovation in the rigging and animation world.
I can’t help thinking that overlaying the curves in the main 3D viewport is the dumbest UI decision I’ve seen in ages though.
Akeytsu’s main developer is hanging around blenderartist once in a while. Feel free to ask him some questions or share your impressions of the software
Where is akeytsu’s official forum? I wonder if it has one yet…