Pivot Animator Examples
Leto Corrales
My general technique is, you sandwich in a new parent, in the same axes as its child; you give the new child a copy location constraint targeting parent, local->local, inverse all axes; you then move the new parent to set the pivot position, and rotate it to rotate about that position.
I want a moveable pivot so you can rotate for example the side from the foot from a specific position or for a hand moveable pivot point.
The example i showed is from a blender rig custom made. So it must be possible.
I found the moveable pivot a very handy solution.
Its for animators.
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What i meant is that the pivot can be moved to for example a bit forward as shown in the picture. i can try to show if it is a bone.
But you can yust move the gimbal. And then rotate the foot on that point. Thanks for the solution.
A new animation app/feature would be extremely useful, and greatly appreciated. Features such as frame by frame animation are currently supported by the Adobe Suite of products, but are not apparent in Affinity apps, which may deter some potential customers, of which there are many. I, myself, preferred the Affinity suite of apps instead of other ones because of the more intuitive and better-looking interface, the price, but mostly because it was a pay-once purchase, not a subscription service. I was disappointed that animations were not supported, although it was not extremely important to me, but to others, animations could be a must-have, turning them away from Affinity. Affinity(products) is already great, and a cheaper, more-friendly alternative than some other products offered on the market for students(like myself), designers, photographers and more, but an animation feature would make it even better.
Fully agree to this one. After two weeks of testing, I've just purchased Photo and Designer and I love it on the one hand, but on the other hand I'm often working on frame animations. Some kind of timeline as you guys probably know it from Photoshop would be a great feature - or, as Henry said, make a new app for that.
The devs know I've been making the suggestion repeatedly regarding an "Affinity Animator" app, so I'm not going to beat a dead horse here. Instead, please allow me to offer some suggestions for apps that may be used while we're waiting for Animator.
Apple Motion: $50.00 US, Mac App store. (CAVEAT: if you have not upgraded to Yosemite, the version on the Mac App store is useless to you and the App store does not keep older versions available.)
HitFilm 3 Express: Free, www.hitfilm.com/express HitFilm's big brother, HitFilm 3 Pro, is the lower cost challenger to After Effects. HitFilm 3 Express is the free entry-level version of HitFilm that can be expanded with plug-in packs that range in price from $10 to $100. It does come with some decent base fx, but if you're looking to create fx like you can in Motion, the atomic particles pack is a $100 additional investment.
Natron: Free/Open source, natron.inria.fr
Natron (pronounced like "matron") is a compositor that has an interface very similar to Nuke and can do motion graphics. It is also open fx friendly and will accept most plugins (commercial & open) built under that architecture. As a suggestion, use the snapshot builds. These are the betas of version 2 and have much more functionality than the stable builds. For example, the snapshot has a dope sheet, the stable build does not.
Hope this helps.
BTW, in all of the free packages I outlined above, the process from Designer would be to export your assets as PNG files w/alpha channels. HitFilm and Natron do not accept any vector graphics at this time.
Wow, I have actually never heard of Motion before! I checked Apple's website on this, but it doesn't look that promising- Not many upgrades, more dependence on Logic Pro, and it looks a bit more like a side project for Apple. But anyways, I might use it if I really needed to, thanks for the suggestion!
I second what is said and I have Motion and it is good for what it is meant for; Motion graphics, but rather clumsy for classical 2D animation, something I want to work more with as I am full of ideas, but I have struggled uphill the steep learning curve of Toon Boom's products and althouth their latest Harmony Essentials is a step forward in the right direction, it is not there. As a cartoonist and illustrator I think 2D animation will be more and more important as we are moving from print to the web. 3D may be good for film etc. but 2D has a future as one can create much lighter animations and like animated illustrations, for instance. Animated ads. There are no limits.
But what I want to see is an animation app for us who actually draw.
The problem with everything I have tested so far is that they feel like mobile phones before the iPhone and mp3-players before the iPod. They do the job but they are clumsy and unintuitive.
I have tried to create multilayered files with Affinity Designer to import them with layers intact into Harmony, but so far I haven't succeeded. Seems like the PSD-files need to handled in Photoshop to transform the layers into folders - and then you need the full version and no thanks. And why? Why can't the software do that for you? Creative software should remove all the hoops and loops, hurdles and obstacles and tedious tasks and let us concentrate on what we can, create. I am not a developer and neither do I need an animation software which resembles old time analogue animation studios.
It is difficult to put it down exactly what I am looking for but Affinity Designer is to me the iPhone of vector design, something which I have struggled with during many years as well. After a few days with Affinity I am able to throw together illustrations very fast and keep the deadlines although I am procrastinating.
If the people at Serif could do the same for animation, it would be like entering heaven!
You could start by adding simple timeline animation to Designer, but I think it should be developed as a standalone app. Supporting multilayered files from Designer and Photo.
You would be to artists what Apple has been to computers and devices:)
And it is simple. Let the software take care of the tedious tasks. Make way for creation. Can't be that difficult? :D Hahaha! Sorry. Well, good luck! Here's to hope!
PS: And I have of course some ideas as to what is needed. The artist will always be in drawing mode. Perhaps skip the term "camera" since there are no cameras. Create the possibility to move around in a space. Add layers and objects (2D, of course) in that space. Snap in and out of the space and into each layer. Automatic keyframing or keyframing made easy and intuitive. Let the software guess at what you want to do and assist you in that. Automating tweening by dragging objects and layers around. Live previews. Automatic onion skinning. Fluent lip synching. Walk cycle templates to be dropped on to characters. Then you just adapt the template to fit the character. Snapping parts together to create a cut out figure, just by dragging an arm to the torso, drop and snap. Setting pivot points by clicking. Make bones relative to exact shapes. Just highlight the shape and that is what the bone will move and nothing more. And so on. Can't be that difficult, can it? :D
Neither Fusion nor Blender is what I am hoping for. Fusion is more like Motion directed towards motion graphics and effects and Blender is not exactly what I call intuitive and with a boring interface. I want something with which I can turn my comix ideas into animation. Well, with Affinity to create images and multilayred files, Elements+ as an addon to Photoshop Elements and Harmony Essentials, I am at least beginning to see some way out of the confusion. Made this today as a test:
Anyway, the demonstration was good, but the question is how long it would take me to understand how to do that? It is like it is with math; for some it comes natural, for the rest of us it is an occult science:D
No, I am still of the opinion that 2D animation software today is like mobile phones were before the iPhone. Serif seems to have the right approach. Hope they or someone else with the same appraoch are busy working on it.
Speaking of Blender, I realised that my version had to be old but just look at that GUI. That is an engineer's GUI and not an artist's. How on earth am I supposed to work with something like this? What does it mean? Bounds? TexSpace? PassIndex 0? DupliVerts? Where are my drawing tools?
So I downloaded the new version and it was a tiny improvement, but still - how do I get that 3D thing away?
Just a couple of horror examples on how a creative user interface should not be. When I see something like this, I feel like storming into wherever the developers of this are working and throw a laptop at them and tell them to get real!
PassIndex 0? = Pass refers to the render for a layer that might be used reflections, one for basic color, one for shadows etc. -> Index is just a number that indicates to the software which pass or material you are referring about.
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