| Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) |
| Raphael Victal (Blenderaiser) | |
| Jan 14 2019, 12:05 AM |
| Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) |
| Jacques Lucke (JacquesLucke) |
| Jean Da Costa (jeacom256) |
| Joshua Leung (aligorith) |
| Raphael Victal (Blenderaiser) |
System Information
Windows 7 Home Premium
GeForce GTX 750 ti
Blender Version
Blender 2.80, 2826c2be545e, 2019-01-12
Short description of error
The ghost bones do not appear when the "Frame Range" field changes.
Exact steps for others to reproduce the error
1 - Create an armature with 2 or more bones.
2 - Make an animation with the bones.
3 - Select the armature and change the "Frame Range" field in Properties -> Object data -> Ghost -> Around Frame
The plan here was initially that we'd move all the ghosting settings out of armature into the bAnimViz ones, so that, like Motion Paths, we could have the same set of functionality available for both Objects and Armatures/Bones. That is why they were marked as deprecated. (Unfortunately, within about a month of doing that, "Life" (TM) happened and I didn't get around to putting in place the necessary changes then)
In practical terms though, I'm under the impression that the armature ghosting feature hasn't proved to be quite as useful as we'd initially envisioned. Specifically, the problem is that most modern Blender rigs aren't really set up in such a way that showing the ghosts is really of much benefit, as they mostly only show wireframe controllers (i.e. at the endpoints of bodyparts, instead of being crude representations of the bodyparts themselves), making the ghosting not that useful for visualising how the silhouettes change over time. Geometry-based ghosting however would be nice (and is indeed something we'd love to do at some point - animators like/want it, we want it, and we were discussing how it could be done during codequest), but poses a whole bunch of interesting problems.
Perhaps the animators in the studio can offer a bit more insight into whether the bone-only ghosting had any use at all?
Honestly, I use more in 2d animations, it's not an essential tool for me, but it helps in a few moments. Really, ghosts based on geometry would be interesting! I adapted using custom shapes to help in the silhouette, because my focus is to use sprites in the bones on Unity3D. Another thing, I think it would be interesting to have an option to recursively show the ghost bones, for example: with the "Selected Only" and "Recursive" options activated, selecting only the shoulder bone, you would see the ghost silhouette of the whole arm. But I understand if this tool needs to be removed. Thank you!
The animator doesn't need to see the whole path all the time, its like onion skin, so this could be solved by limiting the number of frames evaluated, adding a start_clip and end_clip, maybe even with a pretty fading gradient.
I guess evaluating F-curves is not that slow but evaluating an object/rig with constraints may require a complete scene update, but since most of the time animators use this feature on IK controls we can add an toggle for disabling constraints evaluation and only evaluate the f-curve during the path drawing.