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Author Topic: Feature Requests: Extra options from a motion graphic designer perspective.  (Read 2927 times)

satoer

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First of all I really like rail clone as a modelling tool. But from a motion graphic designers perspective, I am missing some animation controls enabling me to do some fancy animations:

  • Extra generator option: Travel along path. Delete segment at end and spawn a new one in the beginning, or if it’s a closed loop the segment goes round and round. This is useful for creating a roller-coaster or riding cars on a road.
  • Extra selectable option for the Compose object:
    • Leave pivot point at individual segments (Current default)
    • Adopt pivot point from the first segment
    • Move pivot point to X[  ] Y[  ] Z[  ] (edit boxes with the averaged pivot points as defaults)
    So you can connect more joints together and rotate them on their new pivot point instead of their own individual pivot points without the use of complex trigonometry structures. This is useful create things like moving robot-arms

Also I’m missing an option to repeat and offset an animated segment between two frame numbers. For example, if you want to fill the stadium with animated crowd, it is really handy If you can offset every person’s motion to create some diversity.
And to make it even more powerful:
  • An extra available variable for the expression editor that incorporates the current frame number.
  • An extra (exportable) parameter on the segment object that selects the state of an animated object at a specific frame number.
This is not only useful for an animation perspective, but also to an modelling perspective. For example, let’s say you want a row of rocks, but don’t want the same rock everywhere:
  • Model a rock.
  • Add noise modifier and adjust parameters.
  • Animate Seed by key framing it from on frame 0 and 1000 (for different textures you can key frame the UVW maps Gizmo)
  • In railclone segment: Put a random 1-1000 parameter into the frame number parameter and BAM, you’ve got a thousand different rocks.

So that’s my Christmas wish list for rail clone hoping you can incorporate some of my ideas :)
Best regards, Michel.

iToo

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Hi, many thanks for your feedback and suggestions.
Really until now we have not developed any animation capabilities in RailClone because anyone requested it, but we'll take in account your ideas for future updates.
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

satoer

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Thanks for taking it into account!

Even, if you just only implement these options:
  • An extra available variable for the expression editor that incorporates the current frame number.
  • An extra (exportable) parameter on the segment object that selects the state of an animated object at a specific frame number.
Rail-clone greatly improves in animation capabilities.