Mesh2Motion Animation App Introduces Spider and Snake Rigs
Release 10 welcomes skeleton editing improvements.
Mesh2Motion, Scott Petrovic's open-source Mixamo-like animation app for 3D models, received a new update, adding variety to the available animations.
Release 10 introduces spider and snake rigs that will streamline your workflows. The spider comes with 9 animations, including idle, walk, attack, and death, while the snake has 7 similar animations.
"Part of adding these was to expand the variety of rigs to see how well this tool can support different types of creatures," the creator says.
Petrovic also improved skeleton editing to make it easier to drag bone joints to the right position. Now, the position will snap to the middle of the mesh. Moreover, the developer made bone joints display slightly larger and semi-transparent to help see overlapping joints, added an option to move bones independently so they don't affect the child bone positions, and made it possible to move bones to the volume center.
Other changes include:
- Model upload: Add a 3D transform widget to fix model position after adding.
- Add a new gear icon to show settings. Theme toggle was moved here. Also added a new way to control light intensity. More options might come later, like turning on/off the grid or showing data.
- Human animations: Tweaked Quaternius neck bone position to be in line with custom animations for consistency.
- Animation list: Improve 'lazy loading' of previews to minimize image 'popping' that was happening.
- Make all registration animation poses called "Rest Pose" across rigs instead of calling them all a T-pose, for standardization.
- Upload your model: Change A-Pose correction for human to arm extension since that is done automatically now.
- Added a new Learn section to the site to add YouTube videos or other training material.
- Upload your own rig: Added skeleton hierarchy display for better debugging.
- Upload your own rig: Show how many skinned meshes exist in the target rig for better debugging.
- Upload your own rig: Do a better job of clearing all bone mappings when using the Clear All button.
- Upload your own rig: Add text filtering to source and target bones to help find them quicker.
- Skinning algorithm: Try to add a more targeted skinning algorithm based on bone types: torso, limbs, wings, and tail, for better deformation.
- Rename "quadruped" verbiage to "fox" since we might have other quadruped types in the future.
- Tech upgrade: Have all the rigs use a configuration file to dynamically populate the UI areas. This will make it much easier to add new rigs in the future.
- Tech upgrade: Upgraded to the latest libraries: three.js, TypeScript, Vite, ESLint.
- Tech upgrade: Add the ability in code to add extra 3D models. Added an A-Pose human animation for testing for now.
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