You're fucking right

So I have yet another bad day out of my 27,375 available.

Solution Time.

1. Create my own 3D animation tool that does what I need it to;

2. Open it to the community via Sourceforge;

3. Integrate IGTL::Sys into the mix to improve both components;

4. Create 1 x demo project to showcase how it works in a pipeline.

I've named the project; Once I finish the design specifications it's on to coding it.

Planned:

*Support for full 3D Joint/Matrix based animation (Hardware level matrix joints, with bone display option for seamless transitions from your old tools)

*Support for the newly popular UVS animation (Using bones as 2D billboards that have x,y scale and can change uv coordinates per keyframe; Think Odin Sphere)

*Perfect Data Editor so that all data can be viewed/changed irrespective of present 3D view/mode, as well as locking and visible flags for all pieces of data.

*Keyframe based animation on a discrete timeline; So be sure to start with your base FPS set correctly (default is 50)

*Logical flow to data and animation; No 'global timeline' exists. Everything is animated from 'Strips', and 'Sequences' can be made from and combinations of strips

*Mode driven editing; Object mode for scene objects, Mesh Keyframe mode for mesh objects; Pose keyframe mode for Joint/UVS objects.

*Level Of Difficulty integration; Default system is super simple; Advanced users can tweak and expand editors as needed to suit their work mentality

*Entirely abstracted input with multitouch support; Any Human Input readable by SDL can be used and assigned to hotkeys/event keys. This also means you can record some macros within the program. (Automation tools)


Some obvious problems:

-Exporting will be limited initially to a text format for inter-compatibility; So long as the text format specification is rigid (like OGRE xml) then anyone can easily write a converter from text -> custom.

-Speed and User friendliness; If you do not have OpenGL 2.0 or a newer graphics card, the program will initially deny you the ability to use it. This will be fixed later because it is not a priority to write my own TnL for OpenGL 1.1 users. I have done so before, but this is the lowest priority item.

-Operating Systems; Windows and Mac and Linux don't seem to have multitouch support in the SDL I am using. Too bad; I'll have to store special mouse states for 'virtual mice' aka joysticks.

-Networking; I want this program to allow collaborative editing; This is always difficult to do and not a priority item because it is outside the scope of the first version, plus this would be mostly beneficial for scene editing and individual animations; Think cooperative moviemaking

-Rendering; This program is NOT a rendering tool; It can export frames, but onlt as good as your graphics card can make them. I do not want to write a rendering pipeline; But I should include exporters so you can dump a animation to a real rendering program like Blender. However, this is also a low priority item due to it being outside of the scope.

-Complexity; all good tools have reasons for complexity; Generally it is lazy programmers, but that's because some of the basic problems are very difficult, and they have timelines to meet so they do 'the dumb yet it works' solution. I am doing this for no profit, so there will be slowdowns in the development of this tool.

-3D Mesh Modeling; I do not want to make a mesh modeler; That is blender's job, not this tool. I want this tool to focus on making game animations with an existing mesh, as well as weighting the verticies of the mesh in the program. This means I will need some mesh tools; and that means the first thing people will demand is a mesh editor/generator. This is a low priority and not the scope of the program, though I may add some cool tools for it in the future; especially because re-meshing is common in real industry; which includes re-uv mapping and adding/removing some verticies. This will have to be supported and is a medium priority item.


I plan to have it work a lot like blender. I hope if I build it, indy developers and hobbyist animators can use it for their purposes and avoid the headaches with classical paid program nightmares.

This should take me at least 6 months to get a beta out.

-Z