A while back I started working on a few custom viewport tools for Blender and Houdini, but I just can’t find the time these days to give them the attention they need.A few have approached me for tutorials or commissions based on these as well, but I don’t have time for that either. So rather…
Almost every animator I spoke to said “There is no timeline”There is, but on further investigation I discovered what they meant was:“I can’t tear off and re-dock the timeline” As a developer this didn’t make sense to me, why would you want to separate the timeline from the sequencer?So I watched them work and found…
A core tool for both Animators and Riggers is Constraints. Now Unreal does provide “Attachments” which essentially act as animatable re-parenting, as great as that is it is hard to set up and not very flexible. My first approach to this was to create an interface around the existing Attachment system, but I ran into…
Moving on to a more complex tool, the Channel Box. As I primarily use Maya I have decided to more or less copy the structure there as a start, it can be refined later on depending on user experience. The ChannelBox is high up on my list because in Unreal there is a strong disconnect…
Starting the Anim Toolkit off nice and simple with a ControlRig selector.This is implemented as a Slate Editor Plugin for convenience. I split my requirements into “Minimal” and “Production-Ready”. This allows me to know the minimum viable feature set for both my own testing and beta reviews as well as what is required for it…
This year I have started learning Unreal Engine on the side as a fun project. Something that really struck a cord with me is the new ControlRig animation system. To be honest, this opens some some amazing opportunities for VFX, but I can’t help but feel like it is more of an afterthought than full…