Blender Addon : “Animation Joiner”
Francois “CoyHot” Grassard presents his ‘Animation Joiner’ add-on that will merge complex animations into one object using the MeshCache modifier and a PC2 file.
Today is a great day for me. Because I put online my first addon for Blender ! In fact, it’s not my first addon .. but it’s the first I release publicly.
So, I’m proud to present my Animation Joiner. I designed it with dynamic simulation in mind, but I found it could be usefull for character animation, too. My goal was to merge animated objects into only one mesh, animated by a MeshCache modifier and a PC2 file.
Why a PC2 file ?
PC2 is a binary cache file format, wildly use in production. It can be nativaly streamed in 3DS Max and Blender, but can also be used in Maya, Lightwave, Houdini, and many others. Because Blender doesn’t have Alembic support yet, PC2 is for me the best to way to interchange animated object between 3D packages.
But when I wrote this addon, I wasn’t thinking of interchange format. I was thinking of dynamic simulation, and more precisly Rigid Bodies. I work a lot with rigid bodies in Blender. And the most difficult part of the job is to manage cache files, specialy when you have thousands of debris. I dreamed about a technic where you can manage multiple debris as easy as only one mesh. And that’s the goal of my addon.
Ehm… yes.
WOW!
Didn’t even know that I wanted something like this. Now I do!
Thanks!
Stunning to see it adapting to scaling.
Actually it is not ‘Amination’, It is animation. Isn’t it? In his website it shows ‘Animation joiner’ in description, but in title it says ‘Amination joiner’ again.!!!.
Ah shoot! I meant to edit that. Thanks :)
RIDIG BODIES?
Human mistakes?
I guess so but you might at least check the title of your video.
Other than that it looks like an awesome add-on. I don’t think that I’d have a use for it personally because I don’t really do animations but I am sure that others will.
A bit off-topic, but catchy soundtrack. They artists have a bit of Lynyrd Skynyrd-ish vibe.
Nice, I dont remember the exact workflow but I was doing something similar a while back using md2 export/import to convert armature animated characters with cloth simulated clothes into a single shape-key animated mesh that could be used as a duplication object for particle crowd simulations. Even better you do a couple characters and you can create a group for the particle system that creates nice variation. Hopefully this simplifies the process. I think I had to make my own Python script before.
Blender doesn’t support Alembic yet? Doesn’t it support Alembic in much the same way that it does PC2 or MDD, i.e. via a vertex cache?
Please disregard; I hadn’t noticed the date on the post.