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The rest of the rig

The rest of the rig

· 2 min read
Dragos
Balaur

Five modifier kinds instead of two, in 3D as well as 2D. A track that keys vertices. One rig's clips on another. A ragdoll faded in halfway.

The Weights dock over a skinned polygon: the picked vertices, one editable number per bone

What landed​

  • Chain solvers and a spring. modifier2d gained fabrik, ccdik and jiggle. Jiggle has no target: it springs each bone toward the pose the clip left, so a plume trails a walk. modifier3d is the same five kinds, and is entirely new.

    A modifier's chain, the dashed line to its target, and the handle that drags it

  • Deform tracks. polygon/deform keys an offset per vertex, added before skinning. A mouth or a cape edge, without a bone for each.

  • Retargeting. A bone_map pairs canonical bone names with the paths they take on one rig. A rotation key is read as a turn away from the profile's rest, so a clip built for another skeleton still lands.

    The Bone map dock: canonical names on the left, the rig's own bones on the right

  • Ragdolls. physics2d.ragdoll(node) walks a rig into a body and a capsule per bone, hinged to its parent's. A blend mixes the clip's pose with the simulated one.

  • The panels. A Weights dock with Bind, Unbind, Normalise, Auto and Smooth. Mirror in both tools. Trace, over a texture's alpha. Bone names in the viewport.

Two bugs the spring taught us​

Both need a hard shove. The test that found them teleports the rig three units sideways in one frame.

  • It read its own answer. A jiggle bone springs toward the pose the clip wrote. Read that off the bone and you read the spring's last answer, because the spring wrote it. The two agree at any angle, upside down included, so one shove left the chain inverted.

  • The point was held too tightly. It started out kept on the bone's own circle. But a point flung past the origin sits opposite the pose, where the pull is along the radius the projection cancels. It is a direction, not a joint.

The Animation manual has the tables and the TOML.