United3dArtists Archive

Hey guys!

Quite a while back, I posted an idea for a plugin in the old forums. It was something I was working on that would allow me to change out arbitrary objects such as mouth shapes on a character, to animate Aardman style.

I did make a bit of headway on it but was brand new to the language I was using (PowerBASIC... quite different for me than VisualBasic) so I never got a really intuitive interface and just stuck with animating by hand.

Here's an example of the animation style I was going for:


The plugin would basically allow the user to select an object (a mouth shape, or eye, eyebrow, etc.), which is then made VISIBLE (with keyframe set)... the previously-active object is set as INVISIBLE (keyframe set).
That's really all it does... toggle through visibility based on the object selected.

The position of the visible object is based on the location of a NULL, which in this example would be parented to the character's face.

About the best I could do back when I tried it was a listbox where the objects where stored, and the object name was selected from here.
But what I'd like is more of a visual dialog with buttons that can be customized, and possibly saved for each character.


What would be fantastic is if this thing could keep up with multiple NULL/Target objects. So you could for instance have the character's mouth shapes, eye shapes, etc. all controllable from one dialog.

Does this sound like something one of you guys would like to write?

Oh, and this is something I'm willing to pay for. I'm not asking anyone to write it for free!