Balancerun

by NM-8 in Addons


The CPU is setting keyframes for your character animation?

Swiftly and easy animate characters around your scene?

timesaver
Based on natural walk rythms (walk, trot, gallopp) and spring mechanics
your computer animates your character over hundreds of keyframes in a matter of seconds.

Seen the demo video? Have a look at an introduction and basic tutorial here:
https://youtu.be/_p6J1ETJlxA 

easy to use
By simply animating a follow object to guide the character.

  1. Select the object to follow, IK-targets of the feet, optionally other IK-targets to swing while walking, 
  2. set parameters like steptime or swing intensity 
  3. and hit a button to create all the keyframes.


The workflow is designed to use the least input by the user, and produce a perdictable behaviour.This way the interface reduces to a few intuitive parameters about the walk rythm in general, that are swiftly set up and tested.

For humans, horses, insects, ...
...monsters aliens and robots, you can define up to 8 feet (ik-targets) and up to 8 additional swinging objects, a hip and a landscape to walk on.
For bipeds (two feet armature) you can also use a rigify rig to be animated.


Hiking any mesh!
Optionally you can define any mesh as a groundobject, for the feet to stand on. By rotating the targetobject, you can rotate the characters orientation. An insect may align to a steep ground, a horse cannot (it would fall over). So you can define the up-direction of your walkposes by turning your targetobject. This way you can control all motion behaviour from walking, running, climbing with just one animated target object.


You define the motion 
The startingpose of your character will be used as "comfortable" pose and the rig is analyzed to retrieve the length of the legs.
That way BalanceRun fully integrates your rig into the walk algorithm.
In order to walk fluently the character wont always stick to the target object, but rather follows it as an intended point to be. Like attached to a rope. Whenever the motion comes to rest the character eases into its startingpose.


Natural secondaray motion
The hip and the swinging objects will follow the motion of the feet, getting pushed by each step and therefor add a secondary motion to them. 
Spring mechanics with usual "stiffness" and "damping" parameters are implemented, in order to have simliar parameters we know from simulations in blender.


"Why should I buy it?"

If you have anything to do with rigged characters in Blender, this product will save you plenty of time. It enourmously expands your aniamtion capacity by taking full advantage of your computers processing power and vector math to do the job.

Is it a miracle? :)
No, you still want to adjust the animation by changing or animating the parameters, and calculate again to see the new outcome. It is shaping a first layer of your walk. Sometimes it will be necessary to manually refine keyframes, but even refining an animation is much faster, than doing all by hand.


Further development
The code is in permanent development, and has evolved and tested itself in production for several years now. Once purchased you will access all updates of this add on for free.
Current goals and upcoming features are:

-automatic constraints setup for armatures. armatures can be analyzed and ik constraints will be setup for the feet, and other hanging limbs to speed up the rigging process to start animating.

-improved leg gathering while gallopping and jumping physics integration.



have a look at my other items including:

  
  
  

About the Creator: 

I am 3D artist in the advertising & television industry for 25 years.

While working on projects and teaching animation at design college since 1998, i studied physics at the university of vienna.
That equipped me with a solid toolset of math to use in 3D workflows.

I started programming Blender addons and noding vector operations into shaders around 2012.
I love how Blender and Cycles offer a lot of opportunities to speed up rendering and fake depth into surfaces in many ways.

Sales 60+
Customer Ratings 2
Average Rating
Dev Fund Contributor
Published almost 4 years ago
Blender Version 4.2, 4.1, 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.2, 3.1, 3.0, 2.93, 2.92, 2.91, 2.9, 2.83, 2.82, 2.81, 2.8
License Royalty Free
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