Plugins + Scripts Timeline: LightningBunnyWorkshop

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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babul said:

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.

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babul said:

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.

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Dombl said:

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.

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对已知的功能修复：
1，增加了中文的功能使用说明（在烘焙列表下方）
2，优化了物理烘焙的ui排列；
3，修复了撤回时会直接回到撤回操作之前的操作时间的问题并增加新逻辑，现在按撤回只取消一个上一次操作的触发器：假设你一个时间点上的设置了三个触发器，则一次撤回只会撤回操作里面的一个失败。如果该关键帧是复制站粘的，则出来只算做一次操作，会被一次撤回。
4，为姿势引索烘焙功能增加了速度参数控制，现在可以自由调整播放速度和幅度了；
5，位置偏移的最大距离提高10倍。
6，修复因延长时间会导致路径生成垃圾帧的问题
7，现在切割/合并动画可以正常工作了，等分割出来的片段名称会显示该片段的时间范围。合并动画的逻辑变成按照动画排列顺序合并。
8，在目标界面增加了给选择的控制器一次性打关键帧的按钮，该功能和代码均由sunny提供。
9，优化动作剪辑里的循环逻辑，现在可以在保存时选择忽略前面多长时间，这个作用是为了清除掉一些作用过渡的关键帧。这个设置只在播放次数大于一时才起效。...

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