A new year

Over the last year or so, you may have noticed my posts on Just to do Something Bad have dwindled to nothing but announcements of our Notional Pipe streams, with nary a long-winded post on the philosophy of rigging or inscrutable cartoon to be found.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but they basically all boil down to my life being very busy. I’m working full time for The Third Floor now (on things which are extremely cool but of which I cannot speak), Contour Rig Tools was released last year (with the attendant need for support), we’re preparing documentation for Little Bird so it can be released on the Unreal marketplace, and I’m working on proposing another SIGGRAPH talk. Also, I’m now the father of a teenager, which is, as I understand the kids these days would characterize it, a lot.

But that doesn’t mean that no work has been going into the ephemeral system! Quite the contrary, a lot has changed and I’m hoping to have a swath of new features to show soon. I’ll start out with a quick demo of the reproportion slider.

As I’ve probably pointed out a few times, the ephemeral system does not enforce proportions on any character, so it’s useful to be able to restore proportions when needed. Previously you could kinda do this by using the Zero slider with the blend restricted to translation only, but this was awkward and really only worked in Forward mode. The reproportion slider, on the other hand, works in any mode, letting you do things like restore proportions to the arm while keeping the hand in place.

You may also note that the ephemeral system is a lot faster now, and has a nifty bottom bar ui reminiscent of AnimBot. It’s fast enough now that I’m considering trying to do multi-pose interactions interactively—we’ll see how that goes.

We should have a lot more new stuff to show soon, but in the meantime, here’s a link to tomorrow’s Notional Pipe stream where we’ll be showing more development of the leg component: