Animation tools

Moviesandbox now allows you to create your own characters and animations, including your own skeleton setups and physics based animation.
Once you created your own bone structure, you can skin your object by drawing on it, as seen in this video:

bone weighting and skin deformation from Friedrich Kirschner on Vimeo.

I actually use a .tga file created in photoshop for the vertex information, ao all my characters are point based. but you're free to import collada objects as well (including skeletal information).

Also, you can create physics bodies. I am using ODE as physics engine and you can connect multiple physics objects together using a variety of joints. And then skin them, just like regular bones in a skeleton. Here's an example:

ODE Physics test from Friedrich Kirschner on Vimeo.

Again, the actual vertex information comes from a .tga file.
It's all a bit abstract, but that's okay for me...

related work

I just found this via a friend on facebook (who found it through Golan's twitter - damn I should get on there I guess) and it is an amazingly inspiring piece of work.

rhonda 3D drawing tool

It's a different approach than what I am doing, but the outcome and the easy handling (not that it wouldn't require some getting used to) truly show what a different mindset when designing tools can produce.
Knowing that Zach (of awesome openframeworks fame is now on board the project too makes me most happy.

Videos and animation examples of moviesandbox to follow shortly too...

Characters

I worked a lot on character design and rigging tools last week, and out came oneandahalf characters for the project i am currently working all, called VERION.



I am still using photoshop as the main tool here, either drawing the depth information by hand or using the inkscanner
to get an idea what it should look like.

Also, to make the points come out round (and not square, as would be standard) I had to use full screen multisampling. Since I am using Depth of Field and all the other shebang i posted about before, that multisampling had to be carried over to the Framebuffer-objects too, which was much more of a pain than I originally thought.

Noteworthy is that it took me about one week to get the style right for the girl, and about 3 hours to create the guy in the stripy shirt. Way to get your pipeline going...
A big part of that first week was spent on making the character animations look right, which I will talk about in more detail soon.