Don’t be mistaken! I definitely intend on supporting linked objects ASAP, it’s really just a matter of my lack of experience with the workflow preventing me from knowing what the needs are.
The Marketplace is indeed the first place this will make an appearance. I’ve been making good progress in the past couple of days, and I find myself having a lot of fun using the tool, especially with facial animation. Hopefully you all find it just as fun and intuitive!
As a point of clarity: ANIMAT doesn’t prevent you from using a rig that incorporates both ANIMAT zones as well as more traditional controls (widgets, sliders, etc.). But to use those other controls you’d need to drop out of the ANIMAT mode. Is all of that correct?
Yep, nothing prevents a traditional workflow here, ANIMAT is just a convenience utility that sits on top of existing rigs.
Sold!
although I still wish I could set different bones to different bindings on the same region, but I guess in the full scope of this addon, it would be unnecessary.
Hi! What’s the situation of this addon? I have a project coming up where I could speed up my work with this. Assuming I then would not need to create facial rig for my character:)
You’d still need to create all of the shape keys required for your character’s facial expressions. It’s coming along well, I’ll be releasing another video showing the current condition of things at some time today/tonight. Getting close to what will likely be a “beta”-ish release until I can tweak things according to the needs of some artists I have testing currently.
This is a great tool. Thanks for the effort and sharing the info about your work. The difference between free and commercial could be tricky. I’m assuming it will never be trunk because that would open it to the extent that users would be able to add their own equivalents of your intended commercial features?
An idea for the difference between the two: currently the mouse gesture is four-directional. Have the commercial package support eight mouse directions (different shape key for each).
This looks like a great add-on, really looking forward to get to play with it. I was hoping you were maybe done by now since I’m just working on a couple of animated characters for a client at the minute, nothing like learning new under pressure, but deadline’s pretty much up now so I’ll have to wait for the next one 
Still it’ll give me a chance to spend a bit of time learning it, although you seem to have made it pretty straight forward. Can’t wait!
Doing 8 directions would be incredibly difficult to track, as well as to use by artists, not to mention to code. I’ve got some ideas for the free version that I’ve got written down. I plan on sharing the final free version specs in this thread as the Market version is released. I’ll be releasing a second video shortly (either tonight or tomorrow, ended up getting stuck at the doctor for a good chunk of the day today 
) that will show off the more-or-less complete set of features that will be in the initial release.
Hey folks.
Video is recorded, but I’m sick as a dog and sound awful. I need to edit out some of the grossness before it goes up, but I’m just absolutely dead tonight. Lots of bugs fixed in the past couple of days, plus bones integrated back into the main script (which, unfortunately, means more little bugs to crush). As soon as I’m alive tomorrow I’ll get cracking on an update for you guys. Sorry to everyone who’s waiting patiently for this! I’m plugging away at it as often as my brain will allow.
Cheers!
UPDATE VIDEO TIME!
Sorry for the delay folks, this past week has been hell in the form of sickness. It’s still not a perfect video as I’m still on the tail end (sorry for the random jumps from editing out coughs and stuff). Here’s an update of what’s going on. Please leave comments so I can decide where to go to from here.
Cheers!
Also sorry for the audio, just realized my computer was using the wrong mic while I was recording, doh.
Great, i need this so bad… you did an awsome job, put it like it is now in the store and i will buy it, refine later, cause the main stuff works!
Thanks for showing us how bone control works! I’m convinced now that this will be a useful tool for me. Finally I can ditch that intrusive widget.
So far it looks really good, I see the intended workflow with zones, and it works for me. Great upload!
Any news ?
Hey Matt. This last week has been hella busy, otherwise I would have responded to your video sooner. Something I didn’t see you demonstrate is using an IK limb. How are you dealing with free transforms of such a bone? Would they still be constrained to single axes or could you allow two-axis translation on a zone? Single-axis movement would limit the usefulness of the tool for such IK rigs, since IK would need to be constantly adjusted from one channel to the next, whereas two-axis translation would allow a first-try setting, then a few rotation operations on top of that (which is trivial). I’m rarely using single channels nowadays unless there’s a very specific reason for it.
Looking great! I’m excited to build a fully-boned face rig to use this with. I’m glad you’re getting better. I had my own dose of sickness recently, too.
How much time will it take to prep a rigged model to use Animat?
Very cool, BTW, a really big step into artist-land. 
Any bone can have two axes transformed, one for moving the mouse up and down, another for moving the mouse left and right.
That said, IK is giving me some big headaches. The 3DS tool hasn’t solved it either, and I don’t have access to Presto to see what they’re doing obviously. I’ll need to think on it for now. Might be worth it in the mean time to keep IK handles turned on in the viewport.
Setup per zone is maybe 5-10 seconds. You select the faces you want to be a part of the zone, set the appropriate shape keys/bones in the interface, and hit the button. So setup time is really dependent on how many zones you want to set up. For the Sintel rig I’m using in testing, it’s like 5-10 minutes to get everything hooked up properly. Once I implement mirroring (still sorting this out) it’ll be even faster for objects with symmetry.
Any info when it is ready ? Approximately… 2 weeks ? 1 month ? 3 month ? so that i can plan some stuff ahead… (yeah, i need this thing badly, i know, LOL)
Man, i so want to try your addon out!, it feels like i’ll never have to do a face rig again, which makes it totally awesome and much easier to animate.
I was thinking about your IK problem, wouldn’t it be good and easy that you just create a selection zone for the ik, and then move it just like you regularly do?, like it basically uses the selection section to select the controller underneath?, it does seam like a sensitive solution to me.
Hope to hear from you soon and see the progress!