Hey folks,
So I’ve been working on this tool for a little while now, both conceptually and in actual coding, and I think it’s time to get some feedback from the community before release.
The tool I’ve been working on is an animation tool based on the workflow in Presto, Pixar’s animation suite. What that means is a method of animating your rigged and shape keyed models without the need for any viewport-cluttering widgets or digging around in the Shape Keys/N Panel to find the control that you need. Animation happens on model in a fast, intuitive way. Just click and drag on the mesh where you want things to move, and they move It is completely driverless as well, meaning that shape key and bone transform values aren’t “locked” by their driving property, meaning that this tool allows for a combination of both artist friendly grab’n’pull, and technical by-the-numbers accuracy when necessary.
I’ve put together a little preview video to show off where things stand at the moment:
Some features aren’t in the main addon yet, but (almost) everything is coded and it’s just a matter of me squashing it all into one package.
Market release will be first (sorry, people who hate the Market) with a free version release coming shortly afterwards when I’ve decided what the feature set should be. Don’t worry: it won’t be crazy expensive as similar tools for other 3D packages are. I want as many people to be able to use this as possible between the free and premium versions.
This is the result of ~3 months of planning on paper + a little over 5 weeks of full time coding (including learning my way around the Blender API, and starting over a couple of times when better methods were found).
EXTRA SPECIAL thanks to CodemanX, LucaRood, and Campbell for pointing me in the right direction when I hit some mental and blender-related roadblocks.
Anyway, I’d love to hear your feedback and feature requests. Requests might not make it into release 1 if they’re too extensive, but my goal is to get everything reasonable into future releases that people would like to see.
Cheers!
Matt Heimlich
EDIT: Update 1