"Flavour" modifiers for animation

[adam]

Basically a set of presets that can be "added" on top of standard 3dsmax animation, without the requirement of setting up controller lists. These would be processed in a global space context and modify the resultant animation to behave according to the specified "flavour". Possible flavour treatments might be stop-motion, elastic/squash-stretch, slow-in/fast-out, nervous, ...

This would allow animators to work on very simple keyframe setups, but very quickly generate stylistically evocative animation results.

In the context of CAT it is very easy to imagine it as a layer type that can be added to the CAT layers panel; it would probably only have two parameters - the type of "flavour" and the weight of the affect.

I know this is possible with Script/MCG controllers (and others), but a simple loadable method to control this without setting up nested controllers would see it have much broader application and impact. An important point is that the animation "flavour" is processed not on the individual controller level, but in context of the global transform matrix (including it's parent(s) transform context).

Automatron (of the Lot of Robots usage) back in the 2000's mentioned a feature like this (namely stop motion and spring), but I am pretty sure that animation system never got commercially released. That said, in the Automatron context it looks like it was a way to process keyframe animation rather than a real-time modification of the resultant animation that I am talking about.

Year ago I spoke to the CAT developers (before they moved to Softimage) about this, sadly it never saw the light of day, presumably due to the stalled development of CAT since the Softimage (then Autodesk) acquisitions.

[michael_spaw]

Cool. +1

-Michael