Blender Addon - Animation Nodes

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Draise
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Blender Addon - Animation Nodes

Post by Draise »

It does remind me of the Motion Tools addon for ICE in Softimage, and where Fabric engine is giong, but I think it's on the right track. The fact that you can also code your own nodes a la Fabric style is also nice.

I know a lot of Javascript and trueSpaces nodes are open, just not very intuitive and organized.. but I think trueSpace could have a similar system developed if anyone really wanted to put in effort for that. But.. it's great to see a team of people make it out of thin air in something else. I really should get into Blender more.

It is color coded concerning it's vectors, matrices, vertice, floats etc.

I know all this could be potentially done in ICE, and now Fabric - with the bonus of them both being multithreaded and even one GPU accelerated. But I think having a free version in Python will only add to the mix and encourage that mind in youngsters and workforces of the future - making Fabr.

All in all, would you play with it?

Article
Animation Nodes

The plugin presents itself as a new section in the node editor. Its shelf contain more than 100 nodes dedicated to several aspects of objects and values manipulation.

The underlying principle in the use of the addon can be summarized in the following three key words: Matrix, vector, (x,y,z) values.

By breaking down a matrix, we obtain three vectors (location, rotation and scale). Each of these being the composition of three values: x, y and z. See? Nothing really new here. Yet, it is the only thing one needs to understand in order to begin using the addon.

In practice, what can I expect to do with Animation Nodes ?

Animate any kind of object (meshes, curves, lights, bones, metaballs...) and values
Animate vertices and polygons
Animate material nodes
Manipulate text data objects (at last!)
Animate a lot of things at the same time
Create loops and nested loops animations
Get an easy access to sound level/frequency
Play with custom interpolations
Program complex things without actually coding
and more, I guess.
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