Plugins + Scripts Timeline: LightningBunnyWorkshop

[LightningBunny]

LightningBunny submitted a new resource:

Timeline: LightningBunnyWorkshop - AcidBubbles.Timeline.Enhanced - Adds box selection, batch operations, undo and redo, and a procedura

The entire baking system revolves around one fundamental intention: replace the repetitive, mechanical, frame-by-frame manual adjustments in animation production with algorithms or physics simulation, so creators can focus on motion design and rhythm control instead of frame-level grunt work.

Time and energy are the scarcest resources for a creator. If a motion requires manually tweaking sixty keyframes just to achieve a natural follow-through effect, then the workflow itself is broken. The...

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[trashinator]

this could make my previously tedious ideas possible. i will be using this with great interest.

 

[babul]

Hey, this is some really good stuff you made great job, instant replacement of original Timeline for me

I have a question about baking though - could you include tutorial on how to make good looking walking / turning animation? For example if I want a character to walk several steps, turn around in place, walk back and turn around again to the initial position. Sometimes when I move a controller like hips, all baked keyframes are swinging to the side.. or when using turn bake, entire person is suddenly jumping position.

Also, do we need all 15 body controls for this, like in your video (what about person atom main control? I see it's baking itself during walking if I enable it)? I thought maybe feet + head/chest are necessary, but what if you animate arm/hip rotation with manual force plugin (make few keyframes, then paste to match baked walking animation)? That way we still have synced arm/hip swing and let them move with physics instead of having them locked by controls. It's not very clear to me what is exactly expected to do walking animation that works and how does the baking system calculate mid frames.. and how to successfully use your own mid frame so it doesn't make animation look bad.

I had forever problems with making a good looking turning animation, just character turning around in place by doing few steps while rotating.. seeing some good examples would've been great.

 

[LightningBunny]

1. Okay, you've found that the biggest issue with the Walk Cycle Baker is the "hip" controller. This is because I've set the hip as the reference for the flip direction, where the direction the hip points is defined as "forward." You can think of it as drawing a centerline along that direction, and then the body parts on the left and right sides are flipped across this line. If you want to avoid left-right swaying, it's best to aim the hip controller's direction at the midpoint between the anchor controller and the limb on the opposite side (just like I showed in my video).
2. Do you need to use all fifteen body controllers? Not at all. However, in the current setup, the baker defaults to adding keyframes to every body controller that exists on the timeline when baking (this is because I don't normally use a root node). That's my oversight.
3. Regarding the calculation of the in-between frame. I should clarify that the walk cycle animation I understand is basically composed of three key poses: two contact poses and one passing pose. When we have an initial pose, it needs to conform to a basic structure, which is a pair of left-right structured limbs, with the anchor controller in front and the other side behind. The in-between frame is generated by first flipping the initial pose to create the next pose, then calculating the interpolated data between the pre-flip and post-flip poses, and finally adding height information (lifting the foot) to the controllers on the side that are not the anchor within the left-right structure.
4. If you want to use a custom in-between frame, there are two buttons below. The first button is "Calculate In-Between." It will add a new keyframe 0.5 seconds after the current keyframe indicated by the playhead. It does this by first calculating the flipped pose after the keyframe you've set the anchor for, and then taking the midpoint data between the pre-flip and post-flip poses. The second step is to apply the current keyframe indicated by the playhead as the in-between frame for the next bake.

After clicking the first step, you can make any adjustments you want to the calculated in-between frame, then click the second step to apply it. Once applied, you'll need to delete that in-between frame.

 

[LightningBunny]

Hey, this is some really good stuff you made great job, instant replacement of original Timeline for me

I have a question about baking though - could you include tutorial on how to make good looking walking / turning animation? For example if I want a character to walk several steps, turn around in place, walk back and turn around again to the initial position. Sometimes when I move a controller like hips, all baked keyframes are swinging to the side.. or when using turn bake, entire person is suddenly jumping position.

Also, do we need all 15 body controls for this, like in your video (what about person atom main control? I see it's baking itself during walking if I enable it)? I thought maybe feet + head/chest are necessary, but what if you animate arm/hip rotation with manual force plugin (make few keyframes, then paste to match baked walking animation)? That way we still have synced arm/hip swing and let them move with physics instead of having them locked by controls. It's not very clear to me what is exactly expected to do walking animation that works and how does the baking system calculate mid frames.. and how to successfully use your own mid frame so it doesn't make animation look bad.

I had forever problems with making a good looking turning animation, just character turning around in place by doing few steps while rotating.. seeing some good examples would've been great.

I will soon be preparing an update release note and adding a new demo video

 

[Dombl]

Some way to suppress/change the keybinds would be nice, since it leads to a lot of unwanted edits when I type stuff into position fields, trigger values (the dot keybind since I type in a lot of decimals) and atom names (copy pasting when I make lots of similar atoms).
The best way would probably be to not trigger any keybinds while you are focused on a text input, but other ways I can think of would be to have an option to only listen for key commands while you are mousing over the keyframe list.
Using Acidbubbles' keybinding plugin for editing the keybinds could be an option to keep things centralized, but I'm not sure if you'd want to keep your own keybinding code, since I've found the old one to be a bit hit or miss with which atom it considers to be in focus for keyframing and the like.
Even if you don't use the listener/events (haven't really looked inside it) of the keybinding plugin, just trying to get it to force a change to what keys/combinations the plugins use could be nice.

 

[LightningBunny]

Some way to suppress/change the keybinds would be nice, since it leads to a lot of unwanted edits when I type stuff into position fields, trigger values (the dot keybind since I type in a lot of decimals) and atom names (copy pasting when I make lots of similar atoms).
The best way would probably be to not trigger any keybinds while you are focused on a text input, but other ways I can think of would be to have an option to only listen for key commands while you are mousing over the keyframe list.
Using Acidbubbles' keybinding plugin for editing the keybinds could be an option to keep things centralized, but I'm not sure if you'd want to keep your own keybinding code, since I've found the old one to be a bit hit or miss with which atom it considers to be in focus for keyframing and the like.
Even if you don't use the listener/events (haven't really looked inside it) of the keybinding plugin, just trying to get it to force a change to what keys/combinations the plugins use could be nice.

This could indeed become an issue. I'll try to make the plugin's shortcuts stop operating when the focus is on the text input box.

 

[VaMStaff]

LightningBunny updated Timeline: LightningBunnyWorkshop with a new update entry:

对已知的功能修复



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Please make sure all public posts on the Hub include an English translation.
请确保在Hub上发布的所有公开帖子都包含英文翻译

 

[LightningBunny]

LightningBunny updated Timeline: LightningBunnyWorkshop with a new update entry:

Fixed errors and optimized the workflow of the baking system

1. This version improves the sampling method for most baking functions: Action Editing, Non-Incremental Mode for Rotation Position Offset, Momentum Boost, and Reference Baking. Previously, fixed-time sampling was used, which generated a large number of extra keyframes and produced less accurate results. Now, sampling is performed based on the actual keyframe positions, significantly reducing the number of keyframes. The main significance of this change is that it greatly facilitates...

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[LightningBunny]

Please make sure all public posts on the Hub include an English translation.
请确保在Hub上发布的所有公开帖子都包含英文翻译

Okay, I'll pay attention

Please make sure all public posts on the Hub include an English translation.
请确保在Hub上发布的所有公开帖子都包含英文翻译

 

[Murasaki]

Hello, thank you for continuing work on such an essential plugin! @LightningBunny

So far I really like the additions and changes, however I have noticed a few things when I was testing things out that unfortunately prevent me from switching to it just yet.
Originally, while the animation is playing grabbing or moving a control node gets ignored by the plugin, but in this version, it instead gets recorded to the timeline. I'm not sure if that is intended or a bug but it can be a big issue as it can overwrite nodes. If this is an intended feature, it would be nice if it could be turned off optionally.

Another major problem I've had was with selecting controls and nodes on the timeline. Originally, clicking a node selects it, then clicking again deselects it and defaults to all nodes selected. In the UI this does happen, however, in use the node is stuck and remains selected.

Also, if I could suggest something, it would be great if interacting with an animation, such as moving up or down on the list or deleting it, would work across all layers instead of only the selected one. Maybe this is just a personal problem but I work with a lot of layers so the amount of individual animations can get quite high.

 

[LightningBunny]

Hello, thank you for continuing work on such an essential plugin! @LightningBunny

So far I really like the additions and changes, however I have noticed a few things when I was testing things out that unfortunately prevent me from switching to it just yet.
Originally, while the animation is playing grabbing or moving a control node gets ignored by the plugin, but in this version, it instead gets recorded to the timeline. I'm not sure if that is intended or a bug but it can be a big issue as it can overwrite nodes. If this is an intended feature, it would be nice if it could be turned off optionally.

Another major problem I've had was with selecting controls and nodes on the timeline. Originally, clicking a node selects it, then clicking again deselects it and defaults to all nodes selected. In the UI this does happen, however, in use the node is stuck and remains selected.

Also, if I could suggest something, it would be great if interacting with an animation, such as moving up or down on the list or deleting it, would work across all layers instead of only the selected one. Maybe this is just a personal problem but I work with a lot of layers so the amount of individual animations can get quite high.

Your first point about adding new keyframes during playback was something I hadn't noticed — I thought it had been fixed, so thank you for pointing that out. However, I didn't quite understand the other two things. Could you explain them in simpler terms?

 

[Murasaki]

Your first point about adding new keyframes during playback was something I hadn't noticed — I thought it had been fixed, so thank you for pointing that out. However, I didn't quite understand the other two things. Could you explain them in simpler terms?

Well, basically once a control is selected in the dope sheet, it cannot be deselected by just clicking it like you would normally. Try selecting a control like the head, then click it again. Now it should not be selected but if you click the +.1s button in the bottom to skip ahead, you will see that the control is still selected. In the original plugin the logic is, if nothing is selected it defaults to every control being selected but here it just gets stuck.

For the suggestion, I meant the "Manage/reorder animations..." under the "Animations" menu where you would usually reorder or delete your animations. If you have multiple animations and layers and you want to delete one animation that is present on multiple layers, you would have to delete that same animation one by one on every single layer instead of just deleting one animation and the plugin automatically deleting every other animation with the same name on every layer. Again, this could be hyper specific to my use case and others might not need it so feel free to ignore it.

 

[LightningBunny]

Well, basically once a control is selected in the dope sheet, it cannot be deselected by just clicking it like you would normally. Try selecting a control like the head, then click it again. Now it should not be selected but if you click the +.1s button in the bottom to skip ahead, you will see that the control is still selected. In the original plugin the logic is, if nothing is selected it defaults to every control being selected but here it just gets stuck.

For the suggestion, I meant the "Manage/reorder animations..." under the "Animations" menu where you would usually reorder or delete your animations. If you have multiple animations and layers and you want to delete one animation that is present on multiple layers, you would have to delete that same animation one by one on every single layer instead of just deleting one animation and the plugin automatically deleting every other animation with the same name on every layer. Again, this could be hyper specific to my use case and others might not need it so feel free to ignore it.

I understand. This issue will be fixed soon

 

[LightningBunny]

LightningBunny updated Timeline: LightningBunnyWorkshop with a new update entry:

Numerous updates.

1. Added new features, such as Momentum Baking, Lighting Expressions, and Momentum Editing Curves.
2. Optimized the timeline editing interface and fixed numerous bugs.
3. Fixed issues with action editing.
4. Improved the operation workflow.

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