Is Akeytsu a good entry point to re-learn rigging and animation?
polycounter lvl 6
One thing I have not been able to get deep into over the years is character animation, I have tried both Maya and Blender, and always find the amount of work to make a simple keyframe animation to be enormous and somewhat confusing.
While Akeytsu is by no mean panacea, I am interested to see if it can drastically reduce the busy work that comes with popular animation tool (especially for simpler rigs and animation).
I hope @Vexod14 and people with experience can give me some pointers here, Is it cool to learn Akeytsu before I get into Blender rigging and animation? Thx!
TL;DR: I just realize Akeytsu now has macOS build and I can finally try it
While Akeytsu is by no mean panacea, I am interested to see if it can drastically reduce the busy work that comes with popular animation tool (especially for simpler rigs and animation).
I hope @Vexod14 and people with experience can give me some pointers here, Is it cool to learn Akeytsu before I get into Blender rigging and animation? Thx!
TL;DR: I just realize Akeytsu now has macOS build and I can finally try it
Replies
Short answer : YES
Longer one : Instead of having to learn tedious stuff, spent all your money with complex tutorials on old softwares which were never made for animators put only patched so "it could work", you can go throughout Akeytsu and find love for animation back again (and for rig too
From my own experience : I've learnt Akeytsu entirely in half a day. And after a few models rigged and posed in it (call it a warm-up), it took me 20 to 30 minutes to achieve a fullbody human rig with all the basic stuff to start animation. These are some examples made that fast :
And I also made a super-rough rig in minutes to show-off how fast and easy rig/skin becomes in Akeytsu :
From what I can see, the rigging and animating parts appear to be Akeytsu's main advantage?
It does have Voxel now, in the most recent release.
Can anybody say anything more specific than it's really fast to learn? Like, Joe learned it in an afternoon, so what? Maybe Joe is a damn genius. Which specific parts of common rigging and animation workflow are improved? How and why?
Voxels are indeed here since last (October 2019) update, and skinning workflow has been also simplified. Akeytsu is already a great tool for most productions but we know it lacks some specific points, so we're constantly working on improving UI/UX and adding necessary and/or new features
@Alex Javor I'm not a "genius", but I had some experience in rigging/skinning/anim on 3dsmax/maya, learning Akeytsu was easy for these reasons I guess. But also, I recently taught a masterclass at Emile Cohl (Lyon) to traditional 2D animation/illustration students who never touched 3D, and results were : after 2 hours they were up to animate and some of them understood how riiging could be done in Akeytsu, then they spent the rest of the day doing animation and since they were already good in 2D, Akeytsu just allowed them to do the same with 3D models, ranging from a simple ball with two legs to UE4 Mannequin. Second day I wanted to see how they could animate a more complex character. I gave them my little "e-LysE" (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0g0rK) and they tackled excellent moves on her. 2 days, with 3D newbies. Enough if you go with Akeytsu. I won't bet on it with a Maya or 3dsMax.
@pior Maybe ask to sales@nukeygara.com , your point is good but maybe there's some issues that could come with such "free" licensing mode, but I understand your idea, testing features rapidly before going to subscribe. Simply ask us
Edit : not only one tutorial just about the skinning but about several tasks, such as animating a run cycle for example, but we need to take the time to achieve these and we are pretty busy at the moment (being a small team making huge stuff is always a...colossal task)
TBH this kind of user feedback can be very misleading, as people unfamiliar with the regular ways of doing things will likely have a very high level of tolerance to convoluted workflows ... because of the fun of discovering something completely new. Whereas anyone who's done skin weighting for production will want to be able to precisely select verts with a marquee and a lasso selection tool, assign them .25/.5/.75 values, and so on. It's a bit like the difference between a teenager spending hours in FN Creative having a blast placing rocks manually with a gamepad, and an enviornment artist working at lighting speed in a regular 3d program or engine.
I can only speak for myself here but I find it extremely frustrating when software attempts to shove in some so-called "innovative" ways of doing thing *without* also offering the robust/traditional way. As a matter of fact this was my biggest gripe with Akeytsu when trying out the betas/demos earlier : the SimonSays controller with big RGB buttons for XYZ bone rotation sure seemed innovative in theory but in practice I just found it to be very cumbersome and quite slow to interact with imho, and IIRC it wasn't allowing screen-space rotation which made posing really stiff. The same applies to any cryptic icon, menu, and so on - the software seems to be suffering from being somewhat stuck in its own echo chamber. To an extent (and I understand that it might sound like a bit of a stretch !), even the weird exotic name contributes to that feeling. Kinda gives the impression that there is one weird guy at the top, very set in his unique ways and creating his own perfect and unique tool
Ironically I feel like I am right in the target audience for the software (doing mostly 2d work but with a background in 3d, doing some game assets in my free time sometimes with a need to do simple poses and animations) but the app just feels too alien - or at least it felt like so when I last tried it.
For instance the mere fact that videos of the program in action shows a 1995-style interface with no straightforward "File" menu (which is where anyone would expect to find the FBX importer and user preferences and settings) sends a bad signal imho.
As for tutorials : video tutorials always sound trendy, but please focus on text/screenshots based documentation and quickstart docs first as having to learn a technical tool through linear video tutorials has to be one of the most frustrating thing ever.
Sorry for the wall of text - I hope this makes sense !
Thanks this is kind of thing I'm interested to read. I watch the mouse cursor in videos going from selection to manipulator for each tweak, seems tedious as hell. But sometimes in videos people do things the slow way on purpose so I still curious.
No screenspace gizmo sounds like no go to me. Also some time is taken to explain solutions to problems that aren't really problems. The whole weird manipulator thing is meant to reduce hunting for thin axis handles... in Maya the entire gizmo is highly modifoable. I got a big fat one with extra space for preselection. Makes selecting very fast while still accurate. So the entire thing seems to be designed for somebody who has issues that I dont.
My main concern is, for intermediate user with basic experience in Maya, will this be like current workflow, but streamlined? What I don't like is something novel, with its own weird viewport controls and all that. I just want refinement to the common workflow.
Made with love ♥
I will have some time to check it soon, will report back
There are all the cons I bumped into while trying it out:
I've got 3 4K monitors, but I can only use one.
The overlay of the curve editor looks and feels messy.
I had one object that was an invisible wireframe. And I never figured out to change the material.
The 3d manipulator needs a more forgiving activation range. Instead of moving or rotating an object I ended up orbiting the camera.
The 3d manipulator is too big and in my way.
The rotate manipulator should have full circle in all axis. It needs a screen space rotation axis. It has a weird tumble for middle click and drag. And an option for linear rotation instead of the crank style rotation.
Not a fan of the colored manipulator puck. If I'm looking at the puck I'm not looking at the character.
I usually prefer text over icons, and there are a lot of icons. And the tooltips take a while to pop up, and sometimes don't pop up.
Paradoxically, I want a graphical biped picker and not a list of joints.
I didn't realize until after about 2 hours that the logo in the top left was the file menu.
I clicked the ? on the cycle maker and the program froze. I had to use Task Manager to end process.
I skinned a character and made a run cycle. It didn't feel like a breakthrough in workflow that I've been craving.
I felt like it was a series of "Why is this the workflow?" Skinning to half a skeleton and then mirroring the joints feels weird. The timeline has way more information than I need.
I appreciated the skeleton presets. But the how to use page for them glosses over a few crucial pieces of info. What info? Exactly.
If there are plans to be able to support multiple monitors and a dedicated curve editor window, I'll try it again at that time.
But the biggest deal breaker for me recommending it to my studio is there is no scripting language supported.
Btw, we've made a brand new trailer that shows past year 2019 improvements as well as a few "basics" of akeytsu