Life - IdlePoser Prototype

Life is a collection of plugins intended to essentially awake a character, let him/her come to life. Central part so far was the audio-synchronized breathing, which can be used to drive complex animations. This month I started working on an idle animation solution, called IdlePoser. 

Today I'm releasing an early standalone prototype of this, more like a proof of concept. I recommend to not yet use it for larger scenes, as the file format might still change. Also this will be properly integrated into Life at a later point.

Current Features

• State-based instead of Transition-based animation. When using for example AcidBubbles Timeline plugin or regular AnimationPatterns, you would need to define an animation for each combination of poses. With 10 different poses, that would be 90 animations someone needs to setup. With IdlePoser you define just the poses and some additional transition poses which can be partially shared. If the poses are similar you might be able to get away with defining just some 15 poses total.
• Anchoring system. Each control position for a pose can be defined relative to another control or bone position. For example the hands in the demo scene are placed relative to the lThigh/rThigh bones of the character. That means if you happen to move the hip due to some other animation, the hands will still be placed correctly. By default poses are relative to the character atom, meaning if you can move or rotate the character, you move or rotate the entire animation poses as well.
• Load and save as JSON. All animation data is saved separately from the scene in a JSON file. That means your animations and poses can easily be transferred between characters or scenes.
• Modular capture system. Similar to the Timeline plugin you can define which control nodes you want to include in an animation set. AcidBubbles called this "Controllers". The demo scene actually uses two instances of the IdlePoser, one for the hands and a second one for the feet and hip.
• Tabbed-UI. Also inspired by the Timeline plugin is a tabbed UI, simply to avoid throwing all UI buttons and sliders in your face at one.
• Very simple demo scene, just to show the concept. Clicked together quickly, still looks a bit robot-like.

Planned Features

• Morph capture. Currently you can only capture atom control nodes. Obviously you would want to animate fingers, toes and other pose morphs as well. This will enable you to use IdlePoser for facial emotion animations as well.
• Micro-idle layer. I'm planning to add some micro-idle animations that would be applied on top of the pose. These would be very tiny random animations you could scale and tweak for each capture node in each pose.
• Debug display options. With a lot of pose states and captures it is difficult to keep track of what is what. I hope to implement some debug rendering, probably displaying the state graph for a selected control capture using line rendering. This will be similar to the rendered curve of the AnimationPattern.
• Demo scene? I probably should make a more impressive demo scene, it might be difficult for some to see the potential of this tool.

Download

• https://www.patreon.com/posts/life-idleposer-37518802 
• This is an EarlyAccess release! Download will be available for free under CC BY-SA license after June 8, 2020. You are allowed to reference this package in your own VAR packages, even if they are paid or use a different licence. Links to my Patreon are always appreciated.