Release. Pressure. Animate.

allows you to quickly sculpt tweaks and deformation as if providing clay-like adjustments.
There‟s no need to focus on axes interpolation since its interpolation is just like a
blendshape. For control it‟s a single value ranging from zero to one to turn on or off the
created adjustments. It is extremely simple and generates really small amounts of key
data (at most one key per frame per mesh.) In the end this allows for much more control
(not based on the rigs limits) and creates much less data to manage. A complex rig setup
wins only at the automation - which is impossible with the aniSculpt module – like the
automation of creating a nice curve of a complex bendy arm, though automated results
can also be unwanted or create unexpected results (especially with complex setups.)
Simplicity and speed are important for creating quick small tweaks in overall pose and
form, for this it‟s best to use screen-based deformations that work in a 2D space. For this
there should be a brush that mimics the action of the smudge tool from Adobe Photoshop
or the move sculpt option from the open-source platform Blender. By painting over the
mesh it pulls vertices within the direction of the input in screen-space, thus sculpting in
2D as if smudging in Photoshop. This introduces the speed and efficiency of 2D space.
Also, when tweaking the actual mesh it‟s important to notice that the controls can be
hidden and full focus can be used on the actual character instead of its controls. Since
the aniSculpt module allows you to change the actual mesh as if modeling and sculpting
it‟s the most familiar way of tweaking vertices and creating adjustments and increases
the directness of controlling the character compared to using the character‟s controls that
are limited by the possibilities of the rig and can become hard to oversee because of the
complexity of the rig.
I‟ve mentioned the use of pose libraries in production and said that many are
available but are lacking necessary features and simplicity. Based on the needs of the
animator and the extracted guidelines we can distill the requirements for a good pose
library. I‟ll refer to the library designed for this research as the aniPalette. I‟ve not
developed and used this in the production of Mac „n‟ Cheese (2011). Again this is a
module that should be usable in the customizable interface (aniToolkit) or used as a
standalone product within Autodesk Maya. For organizational and clarity its best to have
clean thumbnails to show what each pose is instantly. This way you instantly see what
it‟ll do once pressed. Besides this clarity there‟s some basic functionality we need from
the aniPalette to keep it clean, simple and efficient for the animator. It needs an actual
library to work, and it should be easy to fill the library with poses you‟ve created and
rearrange, replace or remove any poses already in it. The libraries should be easily
accessible and shareable, preferably automatically finding the most recent and complete
version of the character‟s library. This is best done on a server, but without a server or
for backup we need the ability to import and export the library which at best should be a
single file per character.
4. Developing a toolset
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