Some thoughts about Actions and libraries
Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 3:56 pm
I was playing around with Actions the other day. It's a very interesting idea, but it's a bit anaemic at the moment. A few initial thoughts:
- The first thing I tried was to copy a pose from the main timeline to an action. It feels like the most natural way of creating pre-made poses and animations: in context. The other thing I would expect is for the new action to adopt the currently selected keyframes.
- Once a keyframe has been added as a referenced keyframe, it can't be turned into a copy anymore. I would have expected to see that option in the right-click menu where you normally see "add keyframe"
- The other problem of course is that a character's animation often sits on more than one layer. I can't think of a practical solution on the top of my head. It may almost need a rethink of the way AS deals with its layering system altogether.
In the end, this all points towards some more fundamental shortcomings of AS: the minimal implementation of copy/paste in the timeline. The inability to save and retrieve animations out separately... my guess is these have to be addressed first.
In the end of the day, this should be part of a shared library system (characters, animations, sounds, backgrounds, rigs...). E Frontier wants sell assets, right? A library system should really help them. For the more professional users, it would make a massive difference in the way they can organise their projects. It would also allow them to create and sell assets to e frontier who in their turn can sell it on to other users. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
- The first thing I tried was to copy a pose from the main timeline to an action. It feels like the most natural way of creating pre-made poses and animations: in context. The other thing I would expect is for the new action to adopt the currently selected keyframes.
- Once a keyframe has been added as a referenced keyframe, it can't be turned into a copy anymore. I would have expected to see that option in the right-click menu where you normally see "add keyframe"
- The other problem of course is that a character's animation often sits on more than one layer. I can't think of a practical solution on the top of my head. It may almost need a rethink of the way AS deals with its layering system altogether.
In the end, this all points towards some more fundamental shortcomings of AS: the minimal implementation of copy/paste in the timeline. The inability to save and retrieve animations out separately... my guess is these have to be addressed first.
In the end of the day, this should be part of a shared library system (characters, animations, sounds, backgrounds, rigs...). E Frontier wants sell assets, right? A library system should really help them. For the more professional users, it would make a massive difference in the way they can organise their projects. It would also allow them to create and sell assets to e frontier who in their turn can sell it on to other users. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.