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Onion Skinning


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I made a little Onion Skinning OTL for fun. Its nothing fancy and only works on a per object basis but its a start.

Onion Skinning is a handy animation tool. Well, its more of a visual tool. When you have an animated object it shows where the object is going and where it has been. Onion Skinning displays a ghosted version of the geo's transform a few frames before and after the current frame.

It saves you from scrubbing back and forth constantly. In addition, when you edit the animation the Onion Skin updates to show the new positions. Its really useful when implemented well. :P

Anyway,

Here is the OTL

and here is an example.

jim.

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Heh heh! Good one!

Onion skinning is the very first OTL I built myself. I got frustrated with the Cache SOP and such, but its a great tool! It'll be fantastic if SESI build onionskinning into the viewport some time, don't you think? Perhaps they can find a way thats not so memory intensive - perhaps the option of a purely 2D viewport re-draw thing? Is that useful?

Hey! I like the way you did it! Nice one! I see it only supports transforms, but thats cool. I tried it using the Cache SOP for deforming geometry and it worked kinda ok. Another idea was to have a option to use a Primitive SOP and open all the poly's instead of fading them out. We should make one uber-onion-skin that uses both technologies. I'll add mine to yours!

I wonder if we should start naming apprentice OTLs .otlnc? This might save a few peoples scenes. I know I've made the mistake of loading an NC OTL into a full Master session and not noticing that the session switched to NC before I saved it out.

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Onion skinning is the very first OTL I built myself

Nice, two independent onion skinning attempts. Maybe it should be a feature in Houdini. (hint hint wink wink nudge nudge) :P

It'll be fantastic if SESI build onionskinning into the viewport some time, don't you think?

Yea, I think a "in software" solution would be the best/fastest approach. I saw a really cool SIGGRAPH paper a few years back that took the onion skinning approach one step further. You would have your onion skin but you were able to manipulate any of the samples, not just the reference one. When you tweaked one sample the others would adjust accordingly. I gave it two thumbs up.

Hey! I like the way you did it! Nice one! I see it only supports transforms, but thats cool. I tried it using the Cache SOP for deforming geometry and it worked kinda ok. Another idea was to have a option to use a Primitive SOP and open all the poly's instead of fading them out. We should make one uber-onion-skin that uses both technologies. I'll add mine to yours!

Sweet, more ideas to play with. :D Honestly I never put much thought into handling deforming geometry because I assumed it would cook too slowly. You've inspired me to have another go at it. :P

I wonder if we should start naming apprentice OTLs .otlnc?

I agree 110%. :)

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