Etch-a-ton demo videos
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!
Very cool and intuitive :D
i like the feature videos , its very good. wonderful.
Impressed!
This thing will save much time when riging.
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?
@Gryphon: They play normally here (VLC 0.9.4 on WinXP)
jedihe
Sounds like a neat feature, but I’ll have to look up that VLC player to check out the movies
NathanKP – Imagination Manifesto
oh boy
that is REALLY cool :D
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.
Youtube anyone?
-ton will be proud
Omg this is neat! It makes the process so much easier! Thanks teeth!
“etch-a-ton” isn’t related to Ton, it’s a play on words from “etch-a-sketch” and “skeleton”.
Ok,
Got the foolish green going. I so hope this will live up to expectations
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.
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!
That’s incredible Theeth. The continuous embedding is especially impressive.
Intuitive ftw!
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!
These new features look awsome! when will they be included in the builds?
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… ;))
^^ 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. >_<
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.
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
genius!!!
love this
thanks!
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.
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.
@Occulus:
I use “The KMPlayer” myself. Anyone ever tried it?
WOW! Amazing!
That is a wicked feature! Yay! I can’t wait to try it out myself. Thanks so much! ^_^
-Reyn
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.
whoa, this may definitely turn out to be an awesome and invaluable tool…
Thanks so much!
God bless,
-b
http://minosafilms.wordpress.com/
Very, very impressive. Thanks theeth
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 ?
Reminds me of the solid sketch in modo and Zspheres in Zbrush. Pretty nifty.
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!
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 !
That is indeed a bit of ingeniousness right there. Impressive.
Love it!
This is very cool
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!
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 !
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.
@Shaba1: this is not in the released blender.
WHAT!? HOW???? This is the most “intelligent” feature I’ve seen in a software!
Acutally it is. Ijust tried 2.48 and there is a convert to armature choice under the convert button in the Grease pencil popup
No, it is NOT.
This is separate from Grease Pencil.
Converting Grease Pencil to armature does a very poor job.
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-
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-
Nice work theeth. Have I seen that octopus being used somewhere before? I have a vague recollection of auto-rigging or something… :P