---------------------------NEWEST UPDATE-----------------------------
The newest version turns each state into an entire Timeline, through state self-transitions. Just add a transition between a state into itself, and now you can turn that state into a looping animation.
------------------------I NEED YOUR SUPPORT--------------------------
I created a Patreon channel. I need support to keep developing the plugin.
The amount of dedication necessary for this project is huge. When I did the VamTimeline integration, I got in a 2 week loop of work to bed to work, 100% on the plugin, i.e., some 280 hours for a single feature! I'm personally in financial trouble, so that amount of dedication to something I'm not paid to do is not viable. I finally decided I'm willing to get serious with what I'm doing here, but for this to be possible I need enough people to express their support.
Read more at the latest update:
-----------------------------------WIKI----------------------------------
I am writing a wiki at https://github.com/haremlife/AnimationPoser/wiki
You can share instances, animations, layers, etc, in the hub. I highly encourage doing so to start developing a library of community content around the incredible animations that can be built with the plugin!
------------------------WHAT IS THIS PLUGIN?-------------------------
This plugin is essentially a fusion of Virt-a-Mate and The Sims. It is a very powerful and very extensive and self-contained animation/automation system allowing you to give highly complex and almost intelligent behavior to characters, with fully customizable levels of detail, balance between deterministic and random behaviors, spontaneous interaction and coordination between multiple characters, maximum reusability and a minimum-effort philosophy.
The latest version comes with timeline support, meaning you can import animations from VamTimeline.
The videos bellow give very basic examples of the low-level features of the plugin. Walking, rotating, etc, are absolutely the most difficult things to do in virt-a-mate right now, and using a walking cycle animation to walk to a destination carrying the root control so that you can play other animations there is extremely time-consuming or maybe even impossible with other plugins. With AnimationPoser you can draw a path in real time, and the character follows, and you can even stretch and rotate that path by moving the destination point, also in real time. This is one example of thousands of things that the plugin helps you with.
It should not be harder to add new animations to a scene when it already has animations. Other plugins make it harder and harder to include additional actions to a scene and make the characters transition from one to another.
With AnimationPoser it is like you are starting anew with each added animation in the scene. Instead of 20 scenes, you can have one scene where the characters spend hours walking around and playing with stuff and each other in different parts of the house.
Besides that, this plugin is the only one where you can easily share and reuse animation pieces, repositioning them in a whim for reusing in new characters or new scenes, stringing them together, etc.
Randomness is a very important core feature, but you can fully customize the balance between random and expected behavior. Randomness can be used to make the characters feel alive. You can have multiple layers evolving independently to separately control things like arms, head, mouth, tongue, facial expressions and micro-expressions, all running in parallel, possibly with random transitions.
Characters can walk around the house doing multiple actions, interacting with objects and with each other, with very high detail, random variability, vivacity, making it possible to create scenes that unfold continuously for hours with the minimum possible amount of work.
Multiple characters can be coordinated, react to one another, influence each other and interact in multiple ways, through a very powerful messaging mechanism. The "roles" of characters can be reassigned, so that you can easily create new animations from existing ones where the roles of the characters are merely switched. This messaging mechanism does not use triggers.
The characters can play roles in actual stories, and these stories can be random and play out differently each time.
Everything can be saved and loaded with one click button inside the plugin. Nothing else in the scene (like the triggers needed in other plugins) needs to be set up.
-------------------------QUICK START-----------------------------
Sample scenes, tutorials and demos are coming soon.
To see something happening:
1- Go to animations tab and add an animation
2- Go to layers tab, add a layer, and add controllers you want to animate
3- Go to state tab and add a state
4- Add another state
5- Change the position of the controller
6- Click "Capture State" in state tab
7- Go to transitions tab, add a transition between the states. Now click the "IN" box to make it two-directional
8- Go to the play tab and watch the controller go back and forth between the two states
9- If you don't want to repeat some of these steps ever again, save the animation as it is after any number of the steps, then just load it next time
Seems a lot just to see things happening? Don't worry, because with these 10 steps you already learned 90% of the plugin functionality, and the amount of extremely powerful stuff you can do with these simple building blocks is baffling.
Now that you know the basic interface, you can read each feature outlined in the practical explanation below and try it out in the plugin. See what you can accomplish with each new feature.
The wiki currently has an overview of the UI: https://github.com/haremlife/AnimationPoser/wiki
---------------------- PLUGIN FEATURES----------------------
1- This allows for RANDOM animations.
2- This gives STRUCTURE to animations.
3- This allows for REUSABLE animation pieces.
The plugin has a huge amount of features:
---------------------------------CREDITS---------------------------------
Credits to MacGruber for creating the original IdlePoser plugin from which this one was build.
Credits to cdgczta8 for making the plugin stay alive with his great contributions in the github!
Credits to AcidBubbles for the huge help understanding and implementing timelines, and for the code pieces he shared with be for this task.
----------------------------CONTRIBUTING-------------------------------
I really hope to catch the attention of the community and plugin developers. This is not "my" plugin. It's a gift to the community. I have no patreon, and what you can give me back for creating the plugin is sharing animations and scenes built with the plugin, or build new features as a developer.
There is so much stuff that can be added to it, to make it perhaps the most powerful humanoid animation plugin in existence, not only in virt-a-mate.
My contribution is to try to solve my own difficulties with animation by putting existent animation paradigms upside down and creating a new framework.
I hugely encourage plugin developers to fork it in github (https://github.com/haremlife/AnimationPoser) and adapt it to anything you want it to be! And I hugely encourage the creator community to start sharing animation layers, so that maybe soon we have a section in the hub just for reusable animation pieces.
The newest version turns each state into an entire Timeline, through state self-transitions. Just add a transition between a state into itself, and now you can turn that state into a looping animation.
------------------------I NEED YOUR SUPPORT--------------------------
I created a Patreon channel. I need support to keep developing the plugin.
The amount of dedication necessary for this project is huge. When I did the VamTimeline integration, I got in a 2 week loop of work to bed to work, 100% on the plugin, i.e., some 280 hours for a single feature! I'm personally in financial trouble, so that amount of dedication to something I'm not paid to do is not viable. I finally decided I'm willing to get serious with what I'm doing here, but for this to be possible I need enough people to express their support.
Read more at the latest update:
Plugins - AnimationPoser - Updates
hub.virtamate.com
-----------------------------------WIKI----------------------------------
I am writing a wiki at https://github.com/haremlife/AnimationPoser/wiki
You can share instances, animations, layers, etc, in the hub. I highly encourage doing so to start developing a library of community content around the incredible animations that can be built with the plugin!
------------------------WHAT IS THIS PLUGIN?-------------------------
This plugin is essentially a fusion of Virt-a-Mate and The Sims. It is a very powerful and very extensive and self-contained animation/automation system allowing you to give highly complex and almost intelligent behavior to characters, with fully customizable levels of detail, balance between deterministic and random behaviors, spontaneous interaction and coordination between multiple characters, maximum reusability and a minimum-effort philosophy.
The latest version comes with timeline support, meaning you can import animations from VamTimeline.
The videos bellow give very basic examples of the low-level features of the plugin. Walking, rotating, etc, are absolutely the most difficult things to do in virt-a-mate right now, and using a walking cycle animation to walk to a destination carrying the root control so that you can play other animations there is extremely time-consuming or maybe even impossible with other plugins. With AnimationPoser you can draw a path in real time, and the character follows, and you can even stretch and rotate that path by moving the destination point, also in real time. This is one example of thousands of things that the plugin helps you with.
It should not be harder to add new animations to a scene when it already has animations. Other plugins make it harder and harder to include additional actions to a scene and make the characters transition from one to another.
With AnimationPoser it is like you are starting anew with each added animation in the scene. Instead of 20 scenes, you can have one scene where the characters spend hours walking around and playing with stuff and each other in different parts of the house.
Besides that, this plugin is the only one where you can easily share and reuse animation pieces, repositioning them in a whim for reusing in new characters or new scenes, stringing them together, etc.
Randomness is a very important core feature, but you can fully customize the balance between random and expected behavior. Randomness can be used to make the characters feel alive. You can have multiple layers evolving independently to separately control things like arms, head, mouth, tongue, facial expressions and micro-expressions, all running in parallel, possibly with random transitions.
Characters can walk around the house doing multiple actions, interacting with objects and with each other, with very high detail, random variability, vivacity, making it possible to create scenes that unfold continuously for hours with the minimum possible amount of work.
Multiple characters can be coordinated, react to one another, influence each other and interact in multiple ways, through a very powerful messaging mechanism. The "roles" of characters can be reassigned, so that you can easily create new animations from existing ones where the roles of the characters are merely switched. This messaging mechanism does not use triggers.
The characters can play roles in actual stories, and these stories can be random and play out differently each time.
Everything can be saved and loaded with one click button inside the plugin. Nothing else in the scene (like the triggers needed in other plugins) needs to be set up.
-------------------------QUICK START-----------------------------
Sample scenes, tutorials and demos are coming soon.
To see something happening:
1- Go to animations tab and add an animation
2- Go to layers tab, add a layer, and add controllers you want to animate
3- Go to state tab and add a state
4- Add another state
5- Change the position of the controller
6- Click "Capture State" in state tab
7- Go to transitions tab, add a transition between the states. Now click the "IN" box to make it two-directional
8- Go to the play tab and watch the controller go back and forth between the two states
9- If you don't want to repeat some of these steps ever again, save the animation as it is after any number of the steps, then just load it next time
Seems a lot just to see things happening? Don't worry, because with these 10 steps you already learned 90% of the plugin functionality, and the amount of extremely powerful stuff you can do with these simple building blocks is baffling.
Now that you know the basic interface, you can read each feature outlined in the practical explanation below and try it out in the plugin. See what you can accomplish with each new feature.
The wiki currently has an overview of the UI: https://github.com/haremlife/AnimationPoser/wiki
---------------------- PLUGIN FEATURES----------------------
1- This allows for RANDOM animations.
2- This gives STRUCTURE to animations.
3- This allows for REUSABLE animation pieces.
The plugin has a huge amount of features:
- Randomness
- Structure
- State Machine
- Transitions
- Layers
- Animations
- Cross-Animation Transitions
- Sync Layers
- Messages And Roles
- 0-Probability Transitions
- Indirect Transitions
- Path Finding
- Sharing and Reusability
- Avoids
- Root State
- Buttons and Sliders
- Anchors
- Timelines
---------------------------------CREDITS---------------------------------
Credits to MacGruber for creating the original IdlePoser plugin from which this one was build.
Credits to cdgczta8 for making the plugin stay alive with his great contributions in the github!
Credits to AcidBubbles for the huge help understanding and implementing timelines, and for the code pieces he shared with be for this task.
----------------------------CONTRIBUTING-------------------------------
I really hope to catch the attention of the community and plugin developers. This is not "my" plugin. It's a gift to the community. I have no patreon, and what you can give me back for creating the plugin is sharing animations and scenes built with the plugin, or build new features as a developer.
There is so much stuff that can be added to it, to make it perhaps the most powerful humanoid animation plugin in existence, not only in virt-a-mate.
My contribution is to try to solve my own difficulties with animation by putting existent animation paradigms upside down and creating a new framework.
I hugely encourage plugin developers to fork it in github (https://github.com/haremlife/AnimationPoser) and adapt it to anything you want it to be! And I hugely encourage the creator community to start sharing animation layers, so that maybe soon we have a section in the hub just for reusable animation pieces.