Etch-a-ton demo videos

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What is etch-a-ton? This is a new feature in development for Blender, which will allow an artist to sketch out things like armatures!

A few videos created by Theeth, who is the developer behind etch-a-ton, shows up what the feature can do. You will never fear again to setup an octopus!

If you liked Grease Pencil, you will love this new feature!

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    • http://www.falgor.net Falgor

      Very cool and intuitive :D

    • cuneyt

      i like the feature videos , its very good. wonderful.

    • Artisten

      Impressed!
      This thing will save much time when riging.

    • Gryphon

      The .ogv files don’t seem to want to play in VLC… should I use another player? Do the files need to be decompressed or unzipped?

    • jedihe

      @Gryphon: They play normally here (VLC 0.9.4 on WinXP)

      jedihe

    • http://imagination-manifesto.blogspot.com NathanKP

      Sounds like a neat feature, but I’ll have to look up that VLC player to check out the movies

      NathanKP – Imagination Manifesto

    • http://nvanimstudios.wordpress.com Aaron

      oh boy

      that is REALLY cool :D

    • http://www.fahassani.blogspot.com Fahassani

      Cool I need to try that !
      Do you know what we can start rig with this tool?! :-)
      thanks for the post.
      the videos works on my VLC.

    • Lasphere

      Youtube anyone?

    • NAWABZ

      -ton will be proud

    • Lasphere

      Omg this is neat! It makes the process so much easier! Thanks teeth!

    • theeth

      “etch-a-ton” isn’t related to Ton, it’s a play on words from “etch-a-sketch” and “skeleton”.

    • shul

      Ok,
      Got the foolish green going. I so hope this will live up to expectations

    • roofoo

      For those of you having problems playing the videos in VLC, download the latest version of VLC, ver 0.9.4, it will play them. The older versions won’t work.

    • http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com kernond

      LOL! It’s developments like this that make it harder and harder for some to continue to insist that Blender is difficult. If this works as well as it seems in the videos, and the results are consistently usable, it could easily save thousands of dollars in man-hours on large-scale projects. That’s serious.

      Cheers Theeth!

    • seabee

      That’s incredible Theeth. The continuous embedding is especially impressive.

    • http://www.DreadKnight666.com Dread Knight

      Intuitive ftw!

    • AJ

      WOW. That is crazy. I don’t like rigging, and I have dreamed of a day where Blender “just knows” where the bones are supposed to go without having to do so much rotation. This looks remarkably like the realization of that dream. :) Thanks theeth!

    • afalldorf

      These new features look awsome! when will they be included in the builds?

    • http://www.youtube.com Yosh Youtube

      Could you provide the videos in a less strange format or as a youtube link for those not blessed with a special player and not wanting to install one just for this single purpose? :) (We all already had to install a special uncompressor (7zip) to use graphicall builds, so… I know it’s all about innovation and being different, but PLEASE… ;))

    • paul

      ^^ it’s about being free. besides everyone should have VLC on their disk because it is the most non-”special ” player there is playing almost anything you throw at it. >_<

    • theeth

      I didn’t capture those videos for the general public, I was a bit taken by surprise when it ended up here.
      You’ll have to make due with that format (ogg/theora) or wait until someone recompress them.

    • theeth

      I uploaded some of them to vimeo (youtube doesn’t take theora and vimeo is better anyway).

      I’ll probably add some more in there when I take the time.

      http://www.vimeo.com/album/39155

    • http://www.maxpuliero.com Max P

      genius!!!

      love this

      thanks!

    • Occulus

      For those who are complaining about having to use VLC, I’d like to recommend SMplayer. It seems to be able to play these videos with no problem at all.

      Besides, they’re free, and I just have a hate-on for Windows Media Player in general. The fact it can’t play DVDs at all out of the box is just a crime, IMO.

    • Catboy85

      Part of the problem is that the videos do not use a common extension. They should be named .ogg or .ogm, not .ogv, the rarest of the extensions used for this format.

      Most players capable of recognizing this format do not recognizing .ogv.

    • Catboy85

      @Occulus:

      I use “The KMPlayer” myself. Anyone ever tried it?

    • avalon33

      WOW! Amazing!

    • http://www.reynante.deviantart.com/gallery Reynante Martinez

      That is a wicked feature! Yay! I can’t wait to try it out myself. Thanks so much! ^_^
      -Reyn

    • theeth

      Catboy85:

      OGM is a completely different container format not interchangeable with Ogg.

      The ogv extension is mostly used to differentiate between ogg files containing an audio stream only (vorbis usually) and those containing a video stream (more often theora) as well.

      Most player that support the ogg container don’t care about extension, looking at the file header instead.

    • banor

      whoa, this may definitely turn out to be an awesome and invaluable tool…
      Thanks so much!
      God bless,
      -b
      http://minosafilms.wordpress.com/

    • Terence

      Very, very impressive. Thanks theeth

    • wolfram

      Really impressive. Is this done via a Python script or is it C-coded right into the sources ?
      Can we expect this to be in the next official release or in a special build ?

    • HRTC

      Reminds me of the solid sketch in modo and Zspheres in Zbrush. Pretty nifty.

    • Slowboy

      Again, for those who don’t want to install another player – I felt the same for a while, then eventually tried VLC..
      Just install it. It’s tiny, doesn’t get in the way, and has been very useful for playing ‘obscure’ formats.
      It really won’t harm you in any way, and next time someone posts something in a ‘funny’ format you can just say, ‘oh, I’ll have a loko at that’ instead of taking just as much, if not more, time moaning about it!
      Honestly, I was in the same boat, but now I’m very happy to have VLC around when I need it. It doesn’t have to be your main player, just let it hang around till you need it – like now!

    • http://3d-synthesis.com ROUBAL

      Well, I have upgraded my VLC, and looked at the videos…

      I can’t believe my eyes ! What a wonderful tool !

      I hate rigging. This new feature is amazing and will help a lot. It is a powerfull tool and a great time saver.

      A big thank you to Theeth for coding this master piece !

    • Claws

      That is indeed a bit of ingeniousness right there. Impressive.

    • Aka

      Love it!

    • http://www.pyrosever.com pyrosever

      This is very cool

    • BlendMaster

      wow!, this is awesome, cant wait till this is included in a release.

      thanks theeth this is amazing!!!

      is it in the svn trunk?or maybe any dev builds?

      again this is sweet!

    • leFaquin

      Wow man…How can Blender devs come up with ideas like this ?
      I don’t really know Maya and MAX, but is this an exclusive feature?

      This is great…We all love you crazy devs !

    • Shaba1

      Ok just to be clear. This IS NOT included in blender version 2.48 from http://www.blender.org?
      I looked at the videos and some of them said ver 2.47.10
      Some said 2.48.

      Ok third
      this is all well and good. But IF this feature is included in 2.48 how does one turn it on to use it. The videos forgot to mention that.

    • shul

      @Shaba1: this is not in the released blender.

    • Marcus

      WHAT!? HOW???? This is the most “intelligent” feature I’ve seen in a software!

    • Shaba1

      Acutally it is. Ijust tried 2.48 and there is a convert to armature choice under the convert button in the Grease pencil popup

    • theeth

      No, it is NOT.

      This is separate from Grease Pencil.

      Converting Grease Pencil to armature does a very poor job.

    • TheDED

      This is awesome. The one thing I always hated doing in Blender, was doing armatures. Not that Blender was bad at it, but way more that I was horrible at it. I’ve even had to get people to do it for me, because I’m so bad at it. But if this does what it looks like it does, I might have no excuse as to why I haven’t rigged something yet.

      Any clue when I can have this?
      -DED-

    • TheDED

      Oh and one more thing…I watched the videos, and I’ve seen them all I think, but I never saw the armatures actually move the mesh. Is this going to eventually be an auto-rigger or just a faster way to make bones?
      -DED-

    • http://advanced-lemon.blogspot.com/ epat

      Nice work theeth. Have I seen that octopus being used somewhere before? I have a vague recollection of auto-rigging or something… :P