Just for kicks I have drivers another go, and discovered how tremendously powerful and intuitive it is to use curves to command how objects are controlled. A huge number of rigging problems are solved with this approach.
Is this a feature that is found in other applications, or is it unique to Blender?
It’s pretty powerful, you can even use modifiers on that curve.
I think Maya has something like that.
Yes, ive used the modifiers before. Ive kind of knew how it worked for a while, just never sat down to get it into practice. It sure beats endlessly fumbling through constraints! Does anyone have a keyword for a maya equivilant? Im interested specifically in the curves aspect.
It´s similar to “Wire Parameters” in 3ds Max.
Well Maya is node-based so you can connect anything to anything, add an animation curve node in between and there you have your driver. The node editors are less handy than Blender’s but pretty much everything happens there.
Blender’s “Animato = Animate Anything” is probably its most powerful feature. But Drivers aren’t far behind.
What that “curve” gives you is an the ability to define an arbitrary mathematical function that maps the driver’s inputs to its outputs, and to do so visually.
A node-based system … and pretty much everything in Blender is now node-based, or can be … similarly allows you to visually define arbitrary data-flows.
The design of Blender’s user-interface is a trade-off between making easy things easy, and leaving the door wide open for the math-artist creativity of these more advanced features … which really are a tool for creativity, “in a computer-programmer sort of way.”
There’s no dispute that Blender has some powerful animation features.
Are those features unique to the industry, very likely not. Maya is still (by a long ways) the most powerful solution in animation and there’s a reason why Hollywood sees it as their go-to solution. What we can agree on is that what Blender offers is very impressive for the price of nothing.
Yeah. I’m not so much about the “animate anything” aspect. Any software worth using will have this, maya nodes, c4d xpresso, softimage ICE, and so on.
I’m more interested in this “arbitrary” curve capability. SO much can be done with this and done much more easily and faster than with nodes, constraint parameters and scripts alone. Of course, I’m not saying that these curves replaces nodes and scripts either, but, it sure is nice to be able to just say “When Control ‘A’ is at Position ‘X’ rotate Effector ‘B’ by ‘Y’ Degrees and interpolate the difference using a bezier function”. Could you script that, definitely. But having a curve representation is a heck of a lot easier. Using the same interface you can set up limits, constraints, inversions … pretty much anything that gets unnecessarily complicated very quickly when done in a typical “parametric” fashion.
As for “what Blender provides vs. the others,” I doubt that there are too-many completely new ideas in this world, or in this space. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
However, the recent “makeover” of Blender has been a very complete makeover … dramatically improving its power and flexibility from the “bad old days” that most of us remember.
“Animato,” the command system, the node-ifying of damm near everything, the inclusion of an entirely new rendering concept (Cycles) alongside the older ones, and significant improvement to OpenGL support … all of these things have transformed Blender into a very serious powerhouse that a lot of outfits are using as their “primary” 3D-graphics tool in the video space.
That being said, the “majors” probably don’t have anything to worry about, because, once you’ve established a pipeline and are moving millions of dollars’ worth of business through it … to the extraordinarily stringent business demands of the entertainment industry … you’d be insane (and very-quickly fired …) for making changes to it. The various products (including Blender) run in-parallel to one another but really won’t cross-over.
I did not mean for this to be a debate about blender’s capabilities or why other software is in the position that it is. That’s really pretty irrelevant.
I’m asking because I am currently learning Maya and want to utilize this feature there.
Like wire parameters in Max, Maya’s equivalent would probably best be set driven keys. You can visualize and control them from the Graph Editor, too.
Super cool! Thank you!
You can have both things with animations nodes.
not sure if anyone is familiar with After Effect but one feature I love is the ability to “pick whip” the properties from one object to the other.
Is this possible any where within the Curve-based Driver Paradeigm? I’m not sure exactly what you’re referring to here.
This is what I’m referring to :
Basically a visual way of saying take the rotation of object A and drive the scale of Object B etc … in a sort of “audio patching” analogy.