Feature requests for new animation editor

I know! I have limbs that are still stuck in the chair position, and at one point his feet looked like they had been smashed sideways with a hammer! All this stuff I gotta do and all I want is a 1 frame of him lying on his back, SHEEESH!

Gonna try out this 'Slat' or whatever now...

- Jolan

I'm looking all over for the keyframe saving patch mentioned on the avimator website, but I can't seem to find it. Anyone have a link where to get it? Why not put up an SVN repository to incorporate all the fixes and have up-to-date checkouts?

Thanks in advance!

First off, thanks for making an awesome open source program, now I don't need to buy poser! (I probably still will anyways, but now I can put it off )

Now as far as feature requests for AvMotion, I was thinking if there was a way to lock a part down, say the right foot....I am trying to make some animations for a two-handed melee overhead swing, and can't seem to keep the feet stationary (they move where I don't want em)

also maybe a way to grab and move the body parts w/o using the sliders, that would help very much IMHO.

still having some fun with it tho, am able to make static poses easily now

you can grab and move bodyparts
just hold shift,ctrl, or alt and the
rotation axis will lightup for the part
you clicked.
-LW

Thanks, Vince!

I have done a working port of avimator to the Qt toolkit, which IMO works much better than the FLTK toolkit. Did you make any changes to the source? I'd love to incorporate the latest fixes into the port and release a SVN in the next days.

Prelimnary home page and SVN repository available on:

http://qavimator.sourceforge.net/

I'm not too experienced in cross-platform development, so if anyone can test and fix the build on Windows / MacOS, please send me a patch or contact me, so I can add you to the sourceforge developers list.

Have fun!

I know Vince was going to set up an SVN repository some day... is yours "officially sanctioned"?

Sorry for taking so long, but the official SVN repository for avimator is now up. You can download the source by running the following command:

svn co http://svn.avimator.com/avimator

Lex, I already added your patch to the repository and gave you write access (check your PMs for login info).

Zi's branch of the code is specifically for the Qt port, so I think it's best to keep that in a separate repository to avoid confusion.

It's GPL, so it's as sanctioned as it can be

In the meantime I added a couple of features to the program, like protection for the first frame, very basic props support ect. Maybe those can be ported into avimator. I tried to clean up the source to include more object oriented stuff, so there might be some differences.

Now that the two of you seem to be back in coder-land again, maybe we can join our efforts so we don't have to reinvent the wheel

Zi, I definitely agree we should be working together. My only reluctance to completely switch over to Qt is due to its licensing costs on Mac and Windows and its rather bloated runtime. Also, down the line, I was hoping to use either wxWidgets (since it allows for native look-and-feel in the UI, unlike Qt) or CEGUI (for a purely OpenGL app).

I think the right way to proceed is to move certain core functionality of Avimator into a library that is independent of the UI (this would include animation model, keyframing, IK, BVH reader/writer, etc...). Then we can have a thin UI layer on top for Qt, wxWidgets, or whatever.

Then qavimator and avimator can share the same underlying code base and we wouldn't have to repeat the work.

Qt has no cost whatsoever on Windows, and I believe this is the case on Mac, too. It has long since become LGPL for non-commercial software I strongly encourage you to consider Qt, it's just so much easier to handle.

Licence: http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/licensing/opensource

Bloat is not a real problem, IMO. We run a 30 MB 3D world client, I don't think, 2 or 3 MB GUI make any difference. Qt has a consistent, simple and quickly responding user interface, so I think it's definitely the way to go.

wxWidgets is just as bad as fltk if you ask me Personal preference, of course.

If you can get a backend done where we can interface to the GUI, that would be fantastic, but I doubt it can be possible. My recent work on placing props in-scene (which is a great thing to have, try it, if you can!) has shown me, how dependant the current code base is on the GUI. But, if I can be of any help, please tell me what I can do to assist in decoupling things.

qavimator now has in-scene editing tools for props you put in. Next thing will be deleting props and resetting prop parameters. Stay tuned!

sorry, but i simply can't get this program to work--every time i download it, it either says "glut32 not found" or simply gives me a checkerboard with no figure. I noticed someone else had a similar problem and answer was "don't change order of the files as they're unzipped" or something to that effect--I'm not. What am i doing wrong?
Thanks!

FM

What version of Windows are you using? And where are you unzipping the files?
Also, what did you differently between the times when it said glut32 not found and when it loaded but didn't show a figure. Thanks.

i just tried avimator.

that deal where you left click and rotate the floor or tilt it is fucking awesome. genius. gorgeous.

now, i know you're a mac dude, so right-click might be un-cool to you, but for win xp idiots,
if we could right click and zoom in/out. that might be good.

bill the lizard from alice and wonderland. you should read it.

Use the mouse wheel or hold the ALT key while mousing around

Actually, I don't even own a Mac (although that might change soon) but I didn't want to leave the OS X users out to dry so I decided not to rely on right-click functionality. But, now that you mention it, it might be a good idea to add right-click actions as an additional option for the Windows and Linux users.

In the meantime, like Zi said, you can use ALT+drag to zoom.

P.S. glad you like the program!

Vince;

Ref your questions, i'm using windows NT, the files unzip via powerbook and i've saved them on the desktop. I'm starting the program by clicking on .exe file after going into powerbook--it rums sometimes (with no figure, just a checkerboard square), other times it doesn't without me dragging glut32 file to exe folder. Very strange.
Am i opening it wrong or doing something else horribly simple/stupid?

Furry

Hmm... unfortunately, I run Windows XP so I can't reproduce your problems on NT.

But, try unzipping the Avimator files to c:\ instead of the desktop and see if it works. Also, leave a copy of glut32 in the exe folder since I'm not sure if it comes with Windows NT.

qavimator now has rudimentary keyframe editing. Click on a keyframe shown in the timeline and move it left or right to adjust its position.

Hello everyone,

I'm still using an older version of avimator (before it became open source).

I'm having trouble following all the links to get all the items I need to obtain the latest version. I'm interested in the last update where keyframes can be moved up and down the timeline.

Would someone be able to list to me what software I need to download and in what order?

I'm using Windows XP.

Thank you kindly!

We are still looking for people who are capable of compiling a Qt program under Windows. qavimator is only available as source code, not yet as a finished.exe for windows. Linux and MacOSX users can compile the program on their own already.

So if you have experience with Qt and Windows, please speak up

Roenik, I just released a new version of Avimator today (0.4.1) that incorporates all the updates to fix the keyframe problems. Also, it comes with an installer for Windows so it should be very easy to setup (just run the installer).

A version for Mac OS X is coming soon (next few days) and I will update the SVN repository as well so linux users can compile the latest changes.

Thank you Vince!

I'll check out the new features today!

Cordially,

-Roe