yet another free animation editor

i read the guidelines for posts, and they say there is a size limit on attachments, but they did not say what it is, so this is a test to see if the size limit is less than 652 kb.

if you get this program to run, before you do anything else, press a few of the function keys (F1, F2, etc.) to see some sample configurations. while you are on F5, press the 's' key and the 'a' key a few times to see what i call 'fun mode'.

if you want to try a simple animation, go to the help menu - tutorials - first tutorial.

my little monitor maxes out at about 1024 x 768; if yours is much different, you might want to drag and resize things. see the help menu - categories - window size

and, if you want to do anything much more, the main thing you might want to become familiar with is the difference between blue and red animations: see help - categories - red vs.blue avatars.

questions, comments, requests, flames: all appreciated.

(see a later post for a newer version)

thanks,

rod

Wow, you made this? DAUM! Excellent work!

rod, i have to say... this is pretty bad ass! i wish you had told me you were working on something like this about two weeks ago! j/k

couple things: any quick tips on how to do keyframing? the tutorial was crashing on my machine. also, is bvh file loading finished yet? i was having problems loading the linden labs, sample animations.

again, great work so far! let me know if i can help out in any way...

Very nice and commendable.

thanks to all of you.

i have submitted this program to SourceForge as a GPL project. if they approve of it, i will let you know, and then i suppose anyone can go take a look at the source and see if they would like to help out.

vince: sorry about the crashing and stuff. i really don't have a clue as to what could be going wrong, except to say that i've only tested this program on my one computer. perhaps something critical is different in your environment vs. mine: Intel motherboard D915GAV, Celeron 2.53 Ghz, 1 Gig ram, ATI radeon X700 PRO.

thanks,

rod

Rod, really quite nice. I worked through your tutorial with no issues.

Is there an easy way to initialize a project to a completely fresh state? Clear everything but one avater in "T" position, then go from there?

Robus, that's something that I need to add to the menu. To do that now takes about 10 or more menu selections. Excellent suggestion.


i'm a little surprised that you and some of the others are not having crash problems, because there was a serious bug that could surface when you changed the number of frames.

so, i believe this attachment is more stable ( i hope to be hosting these files on sourceforge by next week, so big appologies to SL for the bandwidth).

lol i just noticed that it WILL still crash if you start the tutorial while in 'fun mode'. so don't do that...

(newer version of program available down below in a later post)


rod

Wow... I am very impressed, and I only spent 2 minutes playing with it. I have afew features I'd like to see added, but I won't request them yet because I suspect they are already in the program and I just havn't seen them yet.*smiles*

ok, nepethenes nepenthes ixchel. you know, your name is unbelievably difficult for me. i don't mean that in an offensive way. more like a calibration.

anyway, you're looking for this: press F5, then press s and a in any sequence or speed that you like. like listening to music. yep, thats it.


ok
bye

rod

oh jeez i left off the most important part:

.~*smiles*~.

ok
bye

rod

Just call me Nep. *smiles*

I just used this tool to make an animation, and I am even more impressed now. I'm down to one feature request; I couldn't se any inverse kinematics, where I could drag one joint and have the program ajust the rest. Everything else I thought of was in there somewhere.

inverse kinematics would be a valuable addition.

i will add it if i can. it will take a while, and it is quite possible that i will not succeed.

thanks for the suggestion,

rod

Looks to be coming along very well, both you and Vince have done brilliantly. I do have to say there are certian aspects of the user interface that are a little badly placed and certianly with the 3 axis bars very hard to do anything but other than that keep up the good work, both of you!

P.S
Only complain i have so far is that the camera system is ... well in my mind useless but it does work atleast

I'm really enjoying this tool, more than Vince's. Not that there is anything wrong with Vince's; I just love the geeky hi-tech feel of this program, being able to see and manipulate everything.

First, a bug report;

When the editor is started there is a gap between the plots and the image circles, as seen here.
selecting "restore plot defaults" resizes the plots to be larger, as seen in this image. I like using the three-plot view, and the lack of a gap means I have no-where to put the animation images. I can't find anyway to resize the plots otehr than reinstalling the app.


And some feature requests:

Add an option that displays numeric data next to the edit circles, so I can see how many degress I've moved a joint. For bonus points let the user enter values directly into the numeric field.

Add an optional "floor" to the display.. a simple checkerboard would be enough, just big enough for the model to kneel on. This would help visualizing orientation (when the camera is moved)

Come up with a catchier name than "new_sl". I need a name I can give to people other than "the one from the thread about a free editor by rod Martin", because as soon as I tell people I can make animations without poser peopel want to know how. Maybe SLAT! for Second Life Animation Tool. *smiles*




How are you going with the Source Forge Submission; I'd be interested in helping out, although my programming skills are long out of practice for real languages. (nothing but Warcraft mods and LSL for the last few years)

rod, i just wanted to let you know that if you grab the source code for Blender, there is a directory called intern/iksolver. The code there should get you most of the way to implementing inverse kinematics. Let me know if you need any help...

Also, I believe its under a GPL license, FYI.

vince: awesome. i was just sitting here trying to remember the tiny bit that i learned about finite element analysis so i could start hammering away on the IK stuff, but if that wheel has already been invented, why not take advantage? thanks for the tip, and most definitely yes, i would appreciate any help or advice that i can get. if you have a strong stomach you will soon have the opportunity to look at my code: my sourceforge request was accepted, but since i've never done anything there it will take a while to get the files and stuff organized.

nep: i probably need to draw the controls for some of the items, like plots, framebar, scrollbar, etc., so that they are easier to find, but make it easy to toggle them 'non-visible', because i much prefer a clean look once i've learned where the secret stuff is hidden. having said that, if you position the mouse over the lower right corner of the plot or plots, click and drag to resize. the upper left corner drags them around the screen. 'restore defaults' is mainly there because the program can lose one or both controls off the screen if you do the right sequence of screen resolution changes. you can set up a totally different layout on the 11 screens (F1..F9, F11, F12), and all those settings are stored in the project file whenever you do a save or quit the program.

the same dragging/resizing controls are on the framebar and scrollbar, except that those two are locked together in terms of horizontal dragging.

all of this information and more is hidden in the help menu under 'categories' - 'plots'. the online help is a bit out of date and doesn't mention that you can press 'x' to change the current axis when you only have one plot axis displayed. (i'm pretty sure that key works in the current file posted above. if not, it is in the one i'll release *real soon*.)

it seems that lots of animators like to see numerical angles and be able to enter them manually, so that will be added.

yeah, i've been wanting a floor for some time. my first impulse is to provide an option where the floor can be reflective. *nep rolls eyes*.

slat. okee, works for me.

oh, as far as your programming expertise, once you take a look at my 'trainwreck' style of programming, you won't have anything to worry about, except perhaps your sanity.

i actually have very little experience with animations, so this idea might be flawed, but could we approach the floating/sinking into the ground problem that affects short and tall avatars something like this: in a place open to the public, have a vertical measuring device - numbers on a wall, or stripes or whatever, with an attached animation that bends you over at the hips, with the idea being that you 'measure' the height of your hip joint. perhaps the animation would point your arms straight out so that your fingertips give a more accurate reading. the units are unimportant. you would do the animation, read the number off the wall or stick or whatever, and enter that number into 'slat', and it would adjust the hip translations accordingly. does this make any sense?

bugs, bugs, and more bugs: if you have more than one avatar displayed, and press 'f' to change the current avatar, so that its data is shown in the plots and the edit circles apply to it, the constraints are wrong. once you select a body part in the new avatar the constraints are correct until you press 'f' again.


rod

Wow! Another one!

Really amazing work, rod. Thank you for uploading. I haven't had much chance to play with it yet, but I like how the curve editor overlaps the characters. I thought that was a little strange at first, but it's really useful not having to scan different windows when editing the curves to see the results.


-Xenon

thanks, xenon.

i have a new release for my program. it's not significantly different, so if you are not having problems with the last version, you might not want to mess with this release. here are the main changes:

i finally started numbering the revs: i'm calling this one 1.002 (oops. i found another error in the first frame command which would affect sitting or kneeling poses. this attachment is now 1.003)

per nepthenes request, name is now slat.exe, Second Life Animation Tool

added 'edit boxes' so you can type in the angle you want instead of dragging a dot around.

changed plot line and frame barcolor to be same as plot border, instead of avatar color. this is because some cool looking avatar color schemes have plots that are hard to see. there is an option to go back to the old way.

fixed bug where constraints were wrong after user pressed 'f' key.

a few other minor changes.

i worked a while on a menu item to start a 'new project', and finally gave up, at least for now, because i had to either decide what setup you wanted, or have a very complex dialog which defeats the purpose of quickly starting a new project. then it occurred to me that we should have a few project files to serve as templates. i have included two: one is for poses (new_pose_project) and the other is for general animations (new_project). if you have your own templates that work well, why not post them here?

new color schemes. again, if you have designed one or more attractive color schemes, please share them with us.

i have everything in place at sourceforge, more or less. the main page is here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/free-bvh-editor

you can get the source code there. it comes with a README file that should help you compile it, but i've been down that road before and i expect you to have problems. so, please ask questions here, and if you get it to compile, please mention any critical steps that i forgot to include.

if you want to help, i suggest you get an account at sourceforge and then i can add you as a member so you can use the CVS repository. i've never used CVS before, but *they* say it is an essential tool if more than one person wants to work on the same files. the cool thing about CVS, at least in theory, is that you and i can make changes to the same file at the same time, and as long as we don't work in the same areas of the file, CVS merges our work for us. in reality, i'm pretty sure it doesn't eliminate all the pain, but i think it's worth a try. so, before you do any serious tinkering with the code, you should setup your CVS stuff so it can merge your changes.




if you want to get involved, here are a few tasks that might interest you:

inverse kinematics. i really like Vince's suggestion about using the code from Blender, but have not had time to look at it.

user interface. someone in another thread said blender looked like it was designed by brain-damaged monkeys, and i'm sure some people react that way to this program. if you like the capabilities of SLAT but find the interface lacking, you might want to tackle this.

key definitions: this is a modest project: save a file with the key definitions, so that users can designate their own keys to perform actions, instead of having to press 'p' to turn the plots on and off, for example.

walk generator: this probably should come after inverse kinematics, but at some point this would be a cool feature.

pose palette: someone asked for this in Vince's thread. sounds like a good idea, and not too hard to implement.

floor and other props


and anything else you can think of.


ok
bye

rod

DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS ATTACHMENT. IT IS OBSOLETE, BUT WHILE ATTACHMENTS ARE DISABLED I AM NOT ABLE TO UPDATE OR REMOVE THIS ATTACHMENT. whew. if you want the latest version of slat, go to the sourceforge link in this post.

Something like WinCVS is easy to setup, and not only are "they" right about SCM (SCM==Software Change Management, e.g. CVS) being effectivly essential for a collaborative project I think it's great for personal projects too. Want to pull out the source code for version 1.02? Go back to the way things were yesterday morning? Need to see what files you modified after drinking an entire bottle of tequila and deciding to "optimize" your code?





I said that. I actually like your user interface; things aren't always in the menus I expect (rotate camera in anim, for example) but they are in the menus. Not some bizzare mouse-click meta-key combination. Like something designed by monkeys who got told by their manager they had 15 minutes to get everything in the menus, and he didn't care where it ended up.

*snap!*

That was the sound of the analogy being stretched past breaking point. *grin*

i agree, nepenthes, the camera stuff is in the wrong menu. would it make more sense in the display menu, or the visual aids menu, or where? and, at some point, should i leave some mistakes unfixed to avoid annoying users who are used to the old way? i know i always dread a new Windows release because they try so hard to make the interface oh so much easier, and i have to search around to find things that were moved.



nep said this: Need to see what files you modified after drinking an entire bottle of tequila ?

yeah, that *altered state* programming leads to some interesing results. which reminds me, when i get around to writing a FAQ for SLAT i think the first question should be: this looks pretty cool, but how do i clear all this crap out of the way so i can work on an animation?

ok
bye

rod

Think this is great. Especially impressed with the source code release. Wondered why there wasn't a mac executable at sourceforge...

thanks, doctor, but you might be looking for Vince's thread, 'feature requests for new animation editor: /52/cd/81886/1.html

i think he has a mac executable.

rod

You're absolutely right. My apologies.

I would like to know where i can get it rod i need something and not sure i want to pay 250 for poser even though a few people said thats the only one sl lets you import from.

Thanks
Ron

"You get what you put inand people get what they deserve"
Kid Rock

if the 'it' you are looking for is the mac executable, check out Vince's thread: /52/cd/81886/1.html

if you are looking for the pc version discussed in this thread, scroll up a few posts and you should see an attachment.

hth

rod