Pose Sculpting by Joshua Leung

“This is just a small taste of the new “Adjust” brush I’ve been working on recently with my Pose Sculpting experiments. It’s still quite rough in places, but its a big step up from my previous attempts at cracking these tools (including finding a way to implement the elusive “Draw Brush”). And, btw, this is just the tip of the iceberg! There are a few other things I’ve got working here that aren’t shown in the video, not to mention the long long list of things I’ve got planned out!”

Cool, joshua has done so much for animation in blender. Will be a interesting 2016.

This is interesting, would be useful for key framming

Excitement is buidling up for 2016 here! :smiley:

Is this simply adjusting the mesh for a posed still frame? Or is it a corrective blend shape sort of thing that is key-frameable?

Awesome please please some icons in front of the text.

Looks like the ability to manipulate an underlying rig without going into posemode, select bones/proxies and so on.

OIC. So basically instead of grabbing bones and rotating them, you can use a brush to “sculpt” them into a pose? But it’s not like Chronoscuptfor corrective blend shapes then…?

Exactly. As for your second Q, no idea. Doesn´t look like it, but then again Joshua says he has more up his sleeve, so let´s see :slight_smile:

We already can sculpt a corrective shape on an animated mesh.
Here, Pose Sculpting is a funny way to manipulate rig. You are using a grab or twist brush on bones instead of using translate or rotate manipulator.

It looks partically interesting to do same operation on multiple members.
On Tara’s video, it is quickly shown when antennas are moved.
On old Big Buck Bunny’s video, it is obvious when hands are posed.

Chronosculpt is different, it’s not just creating corrective shapes, you should watch the presentation it’s amazing. I don’t want to go off-topic though, so I am done.

Question was about corrective blend shapes. I answered about that.
I often mentionned Chronosculpt on discussion about physics cache.
But this presentation is really less impressive since we have mesh cache modifier and fracture branch.

This looks pretty cool, well done!

Unfortunately though, it’s an example of tackling advanced features before getting the basics working well. Blender suffers heavily from this. Many advanced features, but often the very basics are broken. Maybe the basic things are more boring to fix? :slight_smile:

Blender’s animation system has some pretty glaring basics not working well, such as:

-NLA Editor being completely useless. Can’t be used at all for combining, say, several mocap takes. Blending doesn’t work right for rotations (things to haywire) , there’s no way to correct feet positions across several clips (meaning your character will jump to a different position for each clip), and there’s no useful, good way to layer animations that works as you would expect. It’s lightyears behind Softimage XSI 1.0 from 2000, 16 years ago.

-Drivers are maddening to set up, and very unclear. Setting up corrective shape keys is a frustrating nightmare. Modo, for example, solves this in such an easy and visual way.

-Animation paths can’t be edited in the 3D view, only in the Graph Editor

-No way to solo a channel to only see one curve at a time. You used to be able to hit V to do that, but that was removed or some reason.

-Still no proper ‘channel bag’ to make actions out of arbitrary F-curves. Actions are still tied to individual objects/armatures, which in many cases is not at all what you’d want. This makes actions mostly useless as a concept for swapping out animations of doing multiple takes (unless your scene only consists of one object…)

-etc

Some of these rather basic things are a lot more important than adding fancy ways to pose characters. Posing isn’t really lacking that much, but maybe the worst thing about it is that you can’t use mesh selection for bones. You have to select bones inside the mesh to manipulate them. And X-Ray’ing the bones on top of the mesh creates much visual clutter that distracts from the character performance.

Still is a fairly cool feature though. Just hope that the basics aren’t forgotten.

@William “Still is a fairly cool feature though. Just hope that the basics aren’t forgotten.”

This is why I like Tons’ management. He wants to fix the basics and make Blender production ready. That takes time and we should respect that.

Cool features is only cool if it’s practical and easy to execute.

William; I don’t think it means the basics are being ignored right now, cases in point.

  • Recent commits reducing the amount of headache that is possible with weight painting
  • This patch in the review tracker which eases the creation of layered deformations without the messy workaround.
  • The work on the new depsgraph (there’s at least several notable limitations poised to disappear almost overnight when future versions enable it by default). Even now, you can turn it on in the current version through the use of a console command.
  • Aiigorith’s recent work in improving the workflow as far as actions are concerned

So we can at least count on the fact that progress has been made (which is easily seen as a good thing as far as FOSS goes with its limited resources and all that).

Right.

And I think many times it’s harder to fix ‘deeper’ issues because you have to dive deeper and untangle stuff to fix them. It’s all good. Joshua is a cool guy, and I have faith he will do awesome work. It’s maybe more of a general comment applicable in many areas of Blender.

He is in pose mode, but uses paint a like tools to move bones.
So instead of selecting a bone, type R/S/G and change individual bone.

That was not removed.
Shortcut just changed to mimic hiding behaviour into 3DView to increase feature discoverability.
You can solo a channel by pressing shift H or hide it by pressing H.

Feature is stil there. You can remap it to V.

Bones can be displayed with discrete wire custom shapes and you can show only needed bone layers.
Since 2.76, there is a bone selection sets addon.

Take a look at last 2.74,2.75, 2.76 and 2.77 release logs about animation.
There are already solutions to some of these problems. It seems that others will happen in 2.77.

Pose sculpting video is just video shared on dev personnal blog about an unshared code without shared testing builds.
It is far away to become next release feature.

Looking at the commit logs though, there has been no shortage of non-trivial fixes and limitations being tackled during the current release cycle.

However, they really do take quite a bit of time to resolve and the majority of those commits come from the core team (which is one good reason why Blender has paid contracts to begin with). Add the fact that there’s a long list of items requiring non-trivial work throughout Blender and that is where I would agree about how it’s going to be a while yet for some of them.

A bit off topic but hey.

Blending several mocap takes with feet positions that aren’t close sounds like a pretty bad idea but if you would like to do it you would probably use the animation stitching feature in the mocap tools. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Benjycook/GSOC/Manual#Animation_Stitching
You would probably need to use the manual fix NLA track to match the feet though.

NLA works better with “normal” animation though, just make a bunch of actions and change the mode to “add” and it will blend as expected, however you can only have one final blended animation per file which can be bad if you’re not doing animation for games.

For animation for renders you can try using layered action constraints instead, which is pretty powerful (and crazy). Animate a few actions, then add a controller bone for controlling the action constraint you’re going to add. For each bone you want to add layered animation to, add an action constraint pointing to the controller bone and choose the transformation that will control the action (scale or rotation or whatever).

When that’s done and you’ve set up the action ranges and so on you can keyframe the control bone to add animation to an action that is playing, or if you’ve got lots of constraints, you can make entire new animations from a bunch of controls. You can even keyframe the action ranges themselves to create procedural animation (by having all of the animation for blending in a single action). And the target ranges. And the influence for the constraints. :spin:

By doing it this way you can have several blended animations in one file, and also bake the final animations for exporting by using Bake Action with visual keying.

-Drivers are maddening to set up, and very unclear. Setting up corrective shape keys is a frustrating nightmare. Modo, for example, solves this in such an easy and visual way.

Corrective shape key: create a shape key (2 if you didn’t have any), select it, pin it, sculpt, done. Then just keyframe it when needed. Hardly a frustrating nightmare in my opinion. :stuck_out_tongue: Even if you want to use drivers to control it they are very clear and do exactly what you tell them to do. When bone x reaches rotation y, enable corrective shapekey z. I don’t think it’s that hard if you know what the stuff in the driver panel means. As a side note if you unpin the shapekey and just set a corrective shape key to 1 you can create a new one and add corrective stuff on top of that which is pretty crazy.

-Animation paths can’t be edited in the 3D view, only in the Graph Editor

Animation paths?

-No way to solo a channel to only see one curve at a time. You used to be able to hit V to do that, but that was removed or some reason.

As someone said you can do this with Hide Unselected Curves or by just typing the thing you want in the search box (magnifying glass).

-Still no proper ‘channel bag’ to make actions out of arbitrary F-curves. Actions are still tied to individual objects/armatures, which in many cases is not at all what you’d want. This makes actions mostly useless as a concept for swapping out animations of doing multiple takes (unless your scene only consists of one object…)

Actions aren’t tied to individual objects/armatures. If you make a new armature you can use existing actions for it by choosing them in the action editor dropdown.

-etc

Some of these rather basic things are a lot more important than adding fancy ways to pose characters. Posing isn’t really lacking that much, but maybe the worst thing about it is that you can’t use mesh selection for bones. You have to select bones inside the mesh to manipulate them. And X-Ray’ing the bones on top of the mesh creates much visual clutter that distracts from the character performance.

Still is a fairly cool feature though. Just hope that the basics aren’t forgotten.

For the bones you can add custom shapes (circles and stuff) to them and make them slightly bigger than the mesh so you can see them without xray. Or you can just restrict viewport selection for the mesh so you can click through the mesh and select the bone you want, which is probably the same thing as “mesh selection for bones”.

Anyway!

I’m pretty excited for pose sculpting. I like going into sculpt mode when modeling so hopefully this will become the same thing but for animation. :cool: