We have just release a beta version of WebAnimate - a tool based on IKinema engine in the browser
(windows only for the moment) that allows you retargeting and customization of animation and motion capture
data in the browser.
Many aspects would be free forever on this.
Many ideas to be still implemented - like working in a team, streaming from mocap sysytems and kinect etc.
General rigging on any model for FK-IK animation would be available in a few weeks…
At some point we would charge for some features (for example exporting large amount of FBX data …) but we still believe it shouldn’t
be more than few dollars a month.
Hi there! I had already watched all your tutorial videos for the Ikinema Maya plugin, I think it’s an amazing piece of technology, congratulations. One thing got me puzzled though, apparently you guys have no animatable-parameters IK like you have with point and orient constraints. My dream would be having switchable IK-start and IK-end, at least for posing like what you get with the FBIK (motionbuilder) rig and Lightwave’s IkBooster. This way it’s brain-dead easy to, say, pin the chest, unpin the clavicle and pose the arm with clavicle movement, then pin the clavicle and pose the arm (from the hand Ik controller) without moving anything else. No idea how could this be set up with Ikinema though. I’d like to hear your comments about it.
No I had nothing on the screen !?! I will try with your models ! But I wanted my models… Can my models have another skeleton than the normal “Poser” one ?
This is not currently available in our Maya implementation, but we are bringing this workflow for posing to the WebAnimate tool.
Much easier to do it there - all in our control
There are a few workarounds that you can use to do that even now - we will post some ideas on the topic shortly.
The challenge for us is that we are not working with a fix skeleton …
Oh … that’s really bad news! Animeeple was cool and I really enjoyed having an actual application to work with instead of Web stuff.
WebAnimate looks decent, though - and I like the plans for the pricing.
However, you should definitely move from that Trinigy Webvision thingy to Unity! Not only would that open up your tool to Mac users - but it would also open it up to more Windows users.
I tried installing this plugin 3 times now. Each time, it looks like it was properly installed … but it isn’t. In other words: Even with Windows, I can’t try this … this is Windows XP with Internet Explorer 8. I get a German error message (whoever started localizing error messages should be thrown into a dark cave):
So this basically means that there’s a “non-terminated string constant” in line 8, position 121 … I’m not sure whether this error message is related to the problem with the plugin at all - but it’s the only error message I’m getting (and each time I try to open the page, I’m asked to install the plugin, which I do … but doesn’t help ).
Hi Jashan
Thank you for the feedback - we never seen this but we would investigate.
We are working on a port to MAC and Linux so fingers crossed something is coming soon.
Yes. Meanwhile, I also tried it with Firefox - and there the plugin installation worked. I do see some issues there, part of which may have to do with it being a virtual machine (but I guess that really only the first one is a candidate for that ):
Some of the fonts miss pixels and are barely readable (this is probably a VMWare issue - but it only happens with some fonts, and not with others, so it should be possible to fix this). See the attached screenshot.
I need to click into the plugin area to be able to control the “plugin mouse cursor” … and I need to hit ESC to get my mouse back to the main desktop. That feels really weird and cumbersome. It would be much easier if I could simply use the mouse as with every other application, Web site or plugin.
Finally, a Website related issue that I saw on Safari, IE and Firefox (so it doesn’t seem to be a browser specific issue): The opened / closed state of the login panel is not persistent across postbacks. So, when I tried to register the first time with a 6-character user name, I didn’t see the validation error … waited for the mail message … checked my spam folder … waited for another day. Only after trying to register again, and re-opening the panel right after that I could see that you had this requirement. This open/close panel thing looks cool - but the way it’s currently implemented it probably costs you users. If you make sure that it’s still open after a postback, that problem should be solved.
yes this must be virtual machine related issue; We will check but the only suggestion is to play, if you can, with the settings of the video driver emulation
Yes Vision has only this option - we are working on a workaround
A valid point - we are rewriting the php file so that in a case of errors the panel would not close.
Yeah, in Firefox these work fine. It seems like the problem with the plugin is only in Internet Explorer - it seems the ActiveX just doesn’t ever get installed no matter what I try. In Firefox, where the plugin basically works, I still do have the issue with the font, though (and the usability issue with the mouse pointer).
I’ve tried dragon.wa, bvh_to_girl_to_rig.wa and (using import) Dragon_Jump.fbx. When I play those, things look a little like slow motion but the framerate and the looks are fine, so I’d say “it’s working”.
Thanks Jashan !
We are working on the mouse pointer issues.
We are trying to setup also a poll on what features to add short and long term to WebAnimate - any feedback would be appreciated.
Our priorities are marker solving and general rigging, but maybe we should bring forward streaming from mocap systems and Kinect with real time retargeting?
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