General Category > Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum
Feature Request Thread
Raxx:
--- Quote from: Deepthought on January 13, 2016, 07:42:14 pm ---animating bone length should translate vertices along the bone, kind of like they're attached to a hydraulic cylinder. scaling could be a separate tool
--- End quote ---
That's the same effect as moving/translating a bone (except moving also allows you to work in the other 2 axes).
Deepthought:
wouldn't moving in the other 2 axes disconnect the bone from its parent?
Raxx:
Physically, it'll "disconnect" it from its parent if moved on any axis. But so what? The bone still moves and rotates if its parent moves and rotates, except offset from the head of the parent bone. In some animation packages, the relationship between child and parent is shown by a dashed line going from the parent's head to the child's base, so even if it's "disconnected", it's still easy to see what's going on.
The current skeletal animation system in Anim8or is extremely, extremely rigid. Without being able to freely move, rotate, and scale bones, I don't think there's much hope for a good IK and constraints implementation later on.
Visualize, if you will, the current Anim8or getting bone length animation implemented, where it translates the vertices along the length of the bone. Now visualize, afterwards scaling gets implemented where the vertices scale with the bone. Now it becomes really confusing since visually, scaling a bone along the Y axis would look the same as changing the length of the bone, except this same "action" has two different effects. Now assuming that hurdle somehow gets crossed, visualize Anim8or with bone translation finally implemented. Changing bone length becomes redundant, so all that work gets scrapped and all the prior confusion and headache could have been avoided.
Deepthought:
If you're gonna change something might as well go big. and that would reduce confusion.
Raxx:
I did kind of start getting into it in this post and subsequent posts. While it's mostly about bone creation, it shows how "disconnected" bones work in two other animation programs. When animating, translation and rotation works much the same way as in the video.
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