Plugins AnimationPoser

[SuperKingAbobo]

I think the blending to another animation needs to happen in such a way every layer creates a blend transition, instead of the other layers transitioning from their current states to the target sync state. If your diagnosis is right then this is easily accomplished in the code.

Yes. I agree.

After some further testing with the animation transition issue, I've figured out exactly what is happening.

It turns out the layers of a non active animation are not cycling as I first thought, but instead have memory of their last known active state.
Basically each layer has memory of it's last active state from when that animation was last active.

So if a layers last known state was state 3, you enter the animation again and sync to state 1 of that layer, it will first snap to it's last known state, being state 3 in this case, then transition to the synced state 1.

 

[haremlife]

New release for all interested

Release Latest · haremlife/AnimationPoser

Contribute to haremlife/AnimationPoser development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[haremlife]

@SuperKingAbobo I think that was fixed in the latest release

 

[SPQR]

New release for all interested

Release Latest · haremlife/AnimationPoser

Contribute to haremlife/AnimationPoser development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

nice work! happy holidays!

 

[sardarm]

@SuperKingAbobo I think that was fixed in the latest release

I almost thought you gave up，good work

 

[haremlife]

haremlife updated AnimationPoser with a new update entry:

Added self-transitions and severely stabilized the code

This is one of the last versions before the release of the complete plugin, which will be rebranded as version 1.0 under a new name. This is by far the most stable version ever released, the hurricane of the VamTimeline integration went through, and a new crucial feature - state self-transitions - has been implemented.

This version is hosted on patreon because of an issue with the hub, but it's free for download.

--------Patreon------

I created a Patreon channel. I need support to keep...

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[thanos]

I will give this another try. I will keep a look out for you Patreon and example scenes.

 

[haremlife]

haremlife updated AnimationPoser with a new update entry:

Fixed some bugs and added the feature of turning off blending to the final state

Fixed some bugs since the last release:

-Exporting to VamTimeline has been fixed
-Anchors menu has been fixed
-Fixed morph import from latest versions of Timeline
-Disabled anchor damping for now, until I fix an issue with it that affected animations even when not using damping

This also allows me to announce a feature that was here before, but I avoided announcing it because I was aware of some bugs. You have a checkbox in the Timelines tab where you can disable blending to the final...

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[BlueHorizon]

Getting some weird overlapping menus when I duplicate a state, wont go away unless I reload the plugin. Using hub hosted 3.11

 

[kretos]

Yes, me2.
It would be best to present some decent scene using this plugin.

 

[haremlife]

Getting some weird overlapping menus when I duplicate a state, wont go away unless I reload the plugin. Using hub hosted 3.11

View attachment 214272

Thanks for the heads up.

Please save the instance and reload the plugin when you have that issue, this way you can keep creating. I'll try do reproduce the issue and fix it soon.

Also, almost never you need to duplicate a state. Usually "Add State" will already copy the controller positions and most settings to the new state. To be honest I think "duplicate state" is just legacy, but I might repurpose it for copying the looping timelines.

Also notice that due to the lack of support I can't really commit to the plugin development. With 1000 downloads today and no new supporter, it doesn't look like this could be sustainable.

 

[haremlife]

Yes, me2.
It would be best to present some decent scene using this plugin.

There is one last feature I need to implement before I can put my scenes together. Yesterday I made it so that building walking animations is reliable, but I want the walking to work like the walking cycles in a game, so that it manages turns with no extra effort.

Walking from place A to B is something that will happen a lot since the scenes I want to build are like a 24 hour routine in the lives of the house inhabitants. So I want that to be easy to build for the scene creators.

 

[haremlife]

@BlueHorizon Fixed for the next release

 

[haremlife]

Update on the new upcoming walking feature!

Some progress on walking :) | haremlife

Get more from haremlife on Patreon

www.patreon.com

 

[haremlife]

https://www.patreon.com/posts/progress-on-2-79067093

This is something I wished to see on virt-a-mate for a long, long time!
On the first few seconds you can see the animated walk cycle, that makes the character walk two steps forward.
This was hand animated on a hurry so don't expect this base cycle to look great, but you can load any walking cycle that you like, from mocap, VamTimeline, mixamo, and so on.
The "Blend To Final State: off" feature was used to make the feet slip less! Without a hurry you can achieve 0 slipping easily.
Now, on the remainder of the video, you see how a target can be used to make the character keep going forward, following the target, indefinitely, looping the walk cycle, without feet slipping!
The bumpiness is caused by my crappy mouse, low FPS, and the experimental target loop. The actual release will have no bumps while walking
Next step: curves! Time to put to use some interesting Differential Geometry stuff.

 

[haremlife]

haremlife updated AnimationPoser with a new update entry:

The next version will come with a complete locomotion system in-built!

You'll be able to extend any walking cycle into a full motion from point A to B! And, of course, save each of those points into states, and leverage the powerful automatic path finding mechanism so that your character is able to go through doors, avoid obstacles, climb up stairs and much more!

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[haremlife]

Progress on Walking 4: curves

Progress on Walking 4: curves | haremlife

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After straight walking, I had to generalize the code so that it worked when the character has to rotate to arrive at the target.

Right now it doesn't look good because it is just drawing the curve for the root controller, and the curves for the feet and hands are rotated around the root as an anchor.

The next step will be to rewrite the anchors system so that anchoring to a controller in the same layer will draw curves ahead based on that parent controller's timeline. This will allow the feet and hands to properly turn in a way that is intelligent and good enough. Later, the user might decide to bake that animation into the plugin so that he can fine tune. There is nothing remotely paralleled to this in the ecosystem right now.

 

[haremlife]

Progress on Walking 5: integrated control

Progress on Walking 5: integrated control | haremlife

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I decided to leave the anchor system refactoring for later and to focus on allowing the plugin to control the walk target. This way the character can follow pre-defined paths between point A and B, avoiding obstacles.

This will be really important to make Virt-a-Mate to look like The Sims

Yes the walk looks horrible, and it halts at intermediary points. I'm not looking at fine tuning yet. That integration was difficult because of syncing the walk with the transitions, so that the walk is fully managed by the plugin (but you can also freely move the target and make the character walk in real time). All in all, walk is extremely difficult. No wonder nobody tackled the problem like this before in the vam ecosystem.

With this advancement, the characters will be able to go do different parts of the house and do their stuff. The plugin already supports adding things like hunger meters, so that, after some time is elapsed, the character feels hungry and autonomously goes get food and so on

The plugin also supports an avoid system, which can be used for multiple characters to walk around the house autonomously and independently but never collide with each other.

 

[haremlife]

Progress on Walking 6: special state interpolation

Progress on Walking 6: special state interpolation | haremlife

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The last video had the character halting on each intermediate state during the walk.

This was fixed now, together with a new system that automatically interpolates the intermediate states during walking.

Walking is very different from regular curve interpolation, because the root controller needs to point to the tangent to the curve. Which is why this kind of walking is impossible in other plugins.

Here, you just need to define intermediary points so that the character can avoid obstacles. I did this video with just 3 intermediary points (the logical bare minimum). Just set the position of some intermediary points, load the walk cycle and the plugin does all the rest.

Moreover, that new automatic interpolation system allows the same intermediate points to be reused for other walking paths. In other words, the character will automatically be able to draw a path connecting two destinations, and walk between any two points of the house without you having to draw a path separately for each combination. Those paths will all properly avoid obstacles!

 

[haremlife]

Progress on Walking 7: automatic path finding

Progress on Walking 7: automatic path finding | haremlife

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I've smoothed out some rough corners and now I can show what I mentioned in the last update: automatic path finding.

Two observations. One: the video is sped up, two: I haven't implemented rotating animations yet.

What the video does show is how the character intelligently finds the best path between two points. There are 3 end destinations on display here, let's call them A (close to the wall), B (next to the book shelf) and C (in front of the table).

If you wanted the character to be able to walk between A, B and C, then, in other plugins, you would need to create walking animations from A to B, from B to A, from B to C, from C to B, from C to A and from A to C. 6 animations in total. Creating each one of these animations could take hours: Imagine how many keyframes you would need to add. That's a complete hellscape already. Now for 10 destinations, there would be 90 animations, and so on. It would be actually impossible.

Here, all you need to do is load a walking cycle and add the 3 destinations. I also added 3 intermediate points, but the user of a scene doesn't need to be aware of them. The goal of the intermediate points is to avoid obstacles.

The interesting thing is: you don't need to tell the character to go through such and such intermediate point. You just add them. Now you tell the character to go to point B, and it finds by itself the shortest path to get there.

There are lots of improvements I'm gonna add soon, but this is already a dream come true honestly.

 

[haremlife]

Progress on Walking 8: integration with the other systems

Progress on Walking 8: integration with the other systems | haremlife

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Seamless integration between walking and the other systems is a challenge, and the automatic path finding was crucial, but not all. The character needs to seamless do cross-animation transitions into walking animations and back to other animations.

Here, the animation is extremely simple (something put together in 5 minutes) but it shows the seamless integration of the new walking (in this case, crawling lol) system with the old ones.

The beginning is a IdlePoser-style system switching between multiple poses. When a message is sent ("blowjob") it uses the path finding system, which finds a path across MULTIPLE animations to the target. So it moves from the IdlePoser-style system to a system for the turning off of posing-specific controllers (which you can't even notice happening), then the cross-animation transitioning system, then another cross-animation transition into the walking system, which is completely different, but again you can't see it happening, and then it proceeds with the walk system until the blowjob animation, which now makes use of the Timeline system (with a single extra keyframe in this case) to properly move the head and fit the mouth.

End users won't need to worry about this. This is an extremely powerful creator tool. Moreover, the point is not simply animating, but transforming the character into a Automata, a kind of intelligent robot that the user can interact with. There are systems for multiple agents to spontaneously intercommunicate, interact and coordinate.

After the walking is done, I'll create scenes 1000x more detailed than this.

 

[willmason]

Does this support (or do you plan to support) import of BVH animations? Btw your work is legendary

 

[haremlife]

Does this support (or do you plan to support) import of BVH animations? Btw your work is legendary

Can you import them into Timeline? If yes, then you just import into timeline, export as json, and import into animation poser.

I mean, some workflows involve Timeline. I'm not planning on replacing Timeline, it makes sense to have it on the middle because of how it helps with, for example, pruning keyframes after importing mocap.

 

[haremlife]

Progress on Walking 9: Stabilization | haremlife

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It was extremely difficult to get rid of all the bugs and issues that happened after merging the walking system with the other systems, and make everything work nicely together. The walking system kind of had a life of it's own, and now it is subject to the layer and transitions.

I worked on making it easier to setup a walk, as you can see on this video, it is very easy and practical to create a new walk path, so that your characters know how to navigate around.

This version of the plugin will finally be released sometime this week or the next.

 

[haremlife]

Progress on Walking 10: Testing | haremlife

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I don't like either of these animations much. But it has been a long standing challenge to put them together. Walk, turn around, walk back, turn around, and go on like this forever. Posing can be added in the middle. This was kind of the plugin's Final Boss.

So here it is: Perpetual Motion Catwalk Machine!