Roland Melkert Wrote:Animation wise I personally like to keep things manual, for me at least the fun of it all is figuring out how to make it move on a per model basis, it's like: where's the fun in a self assembling puzzle anyway. The only thing you need in such an environment is a extensive grouping meta.
Hi Roland,
I can see the appeal of direct manual description of animations, particularly for a programmer. But I think that the result is an authoring environment that might not be useful for general users.
Jakob's post about robotics helped me wrap my head around the problem a bit. But I think even a good general underlying animation representation (that is built by some other more powerful system like a physics engine) isn't going to as general as "here's a scripting language that can manipulate your model."
If I understand, the grouping meta is what gives you 'non-destructive' animation - that is, the ability to transform the model without 'permanently changing' it. That part is, I think, necessary in almost any animation system.
cheers
Ben