Draw your animation curves with Grease Pencil !
For animators! This idea is completely experimental but I love thinking about it.
I first wanted to be able to just draw things with grease pencil inside the Graph editor, which could be great to sketch out some animations ideas quickly before having to shape the curves by placing keyframes etc.. I quickly realised this was not possible since Grease pencil is time dependant since it can be animated, and as the graph editor is basically a timeline, it could cause issues. (Maybe just disabling time dependency in the graph editor could be a way to go around it)
But then my friend who's an animator told me he would dream about being able to draw directly his animation curves, and I like this idea conceptually ! (refer to the screenshots)
Indeed, it causes the problem where drawing can be multiple times in the same X axis but at different Y axis, and animation curves cannot. So there should be a way to just sample
the highest point of the drawing all the time if overlap occurs.
The line drawn would convert into a baked action curves or a well decimated curve, and the animator could decide if the edges of the curve, where he didn't drew would be flat or would keep going in a linear extrapolation.
I hope this is not a dumb idea!
5 Comments
That's a very creative idea, although I fear there would be some challenges to overcome for it to work.
The first thing that comes to mind is keeping a clean timeline of evenly spaced keyframes (i.e. 2s or 4s) uniformly across all three axis. By that I mean, having a keyframe on frame 6 conherently across x,y & Z, rather than having a key on frame 5 for the x, 4 for the z and 8 for the y etc.
The other thing is that normally curves are adjusted, rather than drawn from scratch. It would take a very fluent understanding of f-curves, particularly with euler rotation curves, to be able to draw a set of f-curves which then produce the animation you desire.
In my experience, it's quite difficult to dissect a set of f-curves which have appeared as a result of traditionally animating something in the viewport. So, the idea of drawing them from scratch to produce actions, sounds very difficult.
Having said that, for relatively minor animation, such as a rooted ball bounce, I could see this working.
I don't see the above as reasons not to try it, but rather just things to consider in your thinking.
Great post, btw. Very easy to understand your idea!
Best Gary
nah i could think of a few things to do with it , basically it must replace the same techniques you would use in the grapheditor. ..
chipping off a bump of a curve, add some wiggly noise, or a bounce at the end of a keyframe . much easier to do with gp then with keyframes or even f-curve modifiers.. you can save adjusting the bezier handles too if you can just draw a curve, which should autoset the handles.
the math to convert gp strokes to curve already exists in blender for the viewport.
but it must work only on parts of the curve and blend/snap the original curve with the gp fixed part...
also it needs the option to create new keyframes as well as just snap the original keyframes for the edited part to the gp line
Yeah, I can see the merit in your examples about smoothing out bumps and adding wiggle noise.
It might be something the Grease Pencil Sculpt tools could be repurposed for too!
It's radical ideas like this that set Blender apart from other 3D applications.
These aren't problems, these are tasks. Pre-solutions.
FUCK YEAH!