Life - IdlePoser v3

In the last few weeks I continued working on my idle animation solution, called IdlePoser. After the prototype released a few weeks ago, it's time to make a proper release. There have been countless bug fixes and usability improvements. Morph capture and debug rendering have been implemented. Obviously I also spend some time on a demo scene and making a video. However, it's still a standalone plugin, it is still not properly integrated into my Life plugin suite.

It's important to understand that the demo scene/video is NOT showing a simple animation loop. These are three different animation systems randomly interacting with each other. In theory this scene has 120 different possible poses for the character. Due to independent random timings, it's actually an almost infinite amount of animations. Creating this with other animation solutions available in VaM would be extremely time consuming, with IdlePoser it can be done in a few hours.

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 many of the lower hand poses in the demo scene are defined 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 in the scene, but can also be saved separately in a JSON file. That means your animations and poses can easily be transferred between characters or scenes.
• Modular control capture. 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.
• Modular morph capture. Just like control nodes, you can also capture morph states. Obviously you would want to animate fingers, toes and other pose morphs as well. You could also use this for facial emotion animations, although the demo doesn't do that, yet.
• 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.
• Debug display options. With a lot of pose states and captures it is difficult to keep track of what is what. I have implemented some lines and colored cubes that will help you understand what's going on. You can enable/disable this in the Debug tab.
• Fancy demo scene. I took the time to make a nice photo shooting scene. The environment was made by VamXFan, the hair as usual by NoStage3. Of course I added some custom global illumination using SkyMagic and I'm using Life 7.

Planned Features

Vague plans for the next few months in random order:

• 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.
• Vertex Anchoring system. Currently you can only anchor against bones or control nodes. However, I have an idea how to anchor against a specific mesh vertex. This would be far more precise as it also takes morphs into account. E.g. the demo scene above could be independent of boob size. Not sure if this is actually gonna work and how much performance it's gonna eat.
• Gaze integration. When combining the Gaze plugin with IdlePoser you will have the issue that both want to drive the headControl. The demo scene solves this by just not moving the head with IdlePoser. If you want your character to move around, this will be an issue. I need to figure out how to make this work. Possibly there will be a "Gaze-Anchor".
• Interacting IdlePosers! Possibly it makes sense to let IdlePosers interact with each other directly. Like simultaneously triggering state transitions, possibly with restrictions on which states to select. If hands move independently like in the demo scene you want to make sure that can't unintentionally collide.
• Commission for more poses! Soon I will put out a commission for a selection of some hopefully reusable poses that will be shipped with the Life plugin suite. Facial animation and more like the demo scene comes to mind, we will see what else makes sense. Stay tuned!

Download

• https://www.patreon.com/posts/life-idleposer-38474694
• This is an EarlyAccess release! Download will be available for free under CC BY-SA license after July 5, 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.