Thursday, August 18, 2011

My First Animation Editor (With Bezier Curves)

I've been working on this on and off for a while now. Ever since I got Maya talking with the Arduino. I thought to myself, "wouldn't it be nice if there was a free app that wasn't bloated and designed just for animating parameters?" Well, I just hit my first milestone for this goal. Eventually I would like to add multi-segment Bezier Curves. Then I would like to have multiple channels of animation. It's all written in Processing so serial communication with the Arduino should be simple. The trickiest thing to get working was the lookup of the Y value on the curve based on where the Time Slider is. Many thanks to Ben Paschke for finding the function I needed in the Blender Source Code and helping me port it to Processing.

There is another Processing Tool out there called Timeline but it's heading in a different direction than I am and I wasn't a fan of it's mixed languages and non-realtime Y lookup function. Plus, I thought this would be a good challenge to set for myself considering the industry I am working in :)

Hotkeys:
Spacebar = Play/Pause
J = Play Forward
K = Play Backward
L = Pause
Left Arrow = Step Backward 1 Frame
Right Arrow = Step Forward 1 Frame 

Click and Drag to Position the Handles or Timeslider