Playing with the BrainStem Robot and its Animation

[Wingnut]

Hi everyone. @brunobg and I were looking for a thread to play-with and talk about… the KhronosGroup BrainStem Gltf robot… mentioned HERE long ago. I don’t know who built it, but it’s pretty cool, and fun to use for various scene-layout smiles.

I’ve made a few demos… here and there. Mine derived from Bruno’s demo.

Bruno thinks that this is a pile of separate animation groups/ranges that are all hooked-together, playing thru all ranges. But I think… this is a dance routine, and meant to be played in its entirety. IF it were a bunch of animation ranges all unintentionally playing sequentially, then I think there would be “jump-cuts”… places where the model suddenly “jerks” to a new animation range.

Anyway, we can talk and speculate, here… and maybe learn some things about this nice robot and it’s fluid animation.

BTW, Bruno, in PG #9, I added line 32… to stop the warnings at-console. Thx for pointing-out those… I hadn’t noticed.

All in all, we will dance in the streets… when armature-animating is somehow made easy and fun. Motion-capture tech… might be a good friend, with a promising future.

The easing, the anticipation, the exaggeration, the skinning… sigh. If a cartoon character EVER made the move, we want to ALSO do it with an armature… and it’s gotta be easy. No stop-action or clay-mation crap for us. We want to push a button, and it does all the work FOR US, right? ahem.

Yeah, Bruno and I and 10 million other people… want a “toybox of armature moves”… and we want each move-toy… to START at the armature/pose position… where our previous animation finished, and have no “seam” at the intersection.

Get real, Wingnut. We KNOW that’s an impossible dream, don’t we? (Can you hear the roaring laughter from low-paid “tweeners” worldwide? nod)

I heard… that it takes about 6 months… to make a single episode of “Archer”… which is a “local” computer-assisted cartoon that doesn’t use 4000 Taiwanese animation tweeners and ink’n’painters. I think South Park might also be that way. I bet both studios… have top-of-the-line hardware and software, though. (drool)

Nope, I don’t think this animation is a sequence of many shorter animation ranges. It’s just too linear and smooth. This is a dance routine… one long, miserable, magical nightmare. (drool)

Thoughts? Dance on!

[brunobg]

Nice. But you seem to consider the demo, and in other cases, such as people running, it makes a lot of sense to make the animation play at different rates and not in sync. Eventually I’ll have time to check on how to do that properly and post an example.

[Wingnut]

@brunobg

it makes a lot of sense to make the animation play at different rates and not in sync

Yes, very true. This robot might have basic walk, run, jump, squat, punch animations on-board… somewhere. I just don’t know if THOSE animations… are part of the animation range that we are currently watching. I am not very experienced with animations or gltf files. I need to investigate the file and examine things in the playground inspector. I’m here to learn things - slowly and gently.

IF the model DOES have walk, run, jump, squat, punch animations… do you think we are seeing them in the current animation? Or do you think maybe we are ONLY watching the “dance” animation and we have not found/played those other ranges yet? Fun to speculate. I suppose we should slow-down the current animation… so we can watch it easier.

I have SO many things to learn! It seems I will never catch-up with the pros. Maybe I need a gltf file analyzer… gives me a fancy 1st-grader-level report on what is found in there. heh. But maybe the playground’s inspector can do the same thing… after I learn to drive it better.

Yeah, bruno… I’ll listen-to and learn everything you/others teach me… as best I can. I have very little modelling experience. I once studied 2D cartoon cel animating pretty thoroughly, and realized that fluid cartoon animation… required LOTS of people. I wished to do it myself… but soon learned that LARGE portions of my life-hours… would disappear… if I became a one-man cel animator. (work-intensive).

Forum/BJS user @Vousk-prod is one of those “infinite patience” animators. I hope he is still nearby. His youTube channel is still active. He’s done stop-action, clay-mation, cel animation, it seems he’s tried it all… AND HE SURVIVED without being sent to an insane asylum. (How did he do that?)

Now that I think about it, I have not seen him around the forum… in SOME time. Maybe he has been committed to an institution. We might need to go rescue him. Christmas time in USA is the time to go to Walgreens and buy-up all the Chinese-made animated/dancing elves, fish, teddy bears, and santa claus toys, and steal their armatures and motors. We can also use those toys… to lure @Vousk-prod onto the lawn of the asylum… where we can rescue him, and attempt an intervention with him… at Sambo’s. heh.

He’ll probably ask for a camera so he can stop-action animate the silverware, plates, glasses, and condiments. It will be therapeutic for him.

I tried to animate 100 cels of sprite animation, once. It nearly killed me. heh.

I wonder if a Blender file exists… for this BrainStem chap. hmm.

[Vousk-prod]

Hi @Wingnut!!

Yep I’m still around (I’ve finaly managed to escape asylum. Sane and free ).
I barely participate in our beloved forum because I am not anymore the lonely developer in my company. Many
talented people now are working with me, I (unfortunatly) have to spend more time on business
part than everlasting fun coding stuff…
But I regularly keep an eye in here, and it’s always a pleasure to read you.

You keep telling that you have so much to learn (well, just as everyone else in this world) and you consider yourself far from the pros, but clearly you’re not a rookie anymore. You even are quite a piece of a veteran now. Look at what you’ve learned so far, how you managed to deduce and understand new stuff more quickly by yourself now, all the complex concepts you naturaly deal with. Your studying curve and your motivation are endless and impressive. And you continue always helping everyone, with patience, kindness and dedication.
You consider yourself not a pro, because many talented people always are one step ahead, nevertheless you are one of the pillar here, and BJS community owes you a lot.

Well… visit time has passed, I now put my straitjacket back, for several new weeks / monthes of silence.

[Wingnut]

It’s The Vouskmeister! Good to see you and thx for the kind (exaggerated) words… nice of ya!

So you’re part of a big ol’ business, now? Not much time to animate or make music? That ain’t no good. I figged Aardman would have sucked you up, by now. But I don’t know how the clay-mation market is doing. I think Aardman made those early "talking cars at the gas station"… with the classic Aardman round-lips mouth-shapes… and then Pixar stole some of that style… for the Cars movies. Aardman should have law-soo’d the hell out of Pixar for that.

(Actually, as we all know, I have no clue whatsoever, and I can check the Aardman website to see what they are doing these days - if anything).

But still, I think Pixar stole some Aardman “look”… when they did the Cars films. But maybe… talking cars will always look similar to other talking cars… no matter what the mouth technique, eh? Lip service. I guess Aardman does computer-generated stuff, too… which I didn’t know until moments ago.

Anyway, good to hear from you. Your current biz got a website? I’d look at it, especially if it had a webGL Christmas tree/lights on it. We’re about to kick-into full “Christmas Decorations Mode” which means get-out the reflection probes, PBR, snow particles, glowLayer lightbulbs, tree-generators, etc… it’s all starting early this year. PARTY!!!

You staying for Christmas goose? Gonna enter a playground in the BJS “Geometric Ornament” contest? Remember the ornaments with the bubbling liquid inside them? (mini lava lamps?) Those were cool. I dunno WHY I get this way at this time of year. All I can think about is lights, reflections, sparkly particles, glow, and pine trees… in webGL. I hope we see some nice yuletide demo scenes this year… no matter the religion/not.

Do ya like this dancing robot, VP? Pretty nice, huh? Do you think it was recorded with motion-capture… from a real-life dancer? I sort-of do… but only sort-of.

I did a new demo… which I think @Deltakosh will REALLY like.

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#JFT1LI#10 I call it “Booger Boogie” Another? Ok. (notice it is a navy hat… perfect for hot-tub ops). Ahhh, fun with layers/compositing… the early years.

It looks correctly positioned on MY screen/rez, but I don’t know how it will look for others. Good fun!

Ok, that’s about all I have, for now. I still haven’t examined Mr. Brainstem’s animations… too busy using him for comedy scene-layout laughs. Hey, others, be sure to tour-around on VP’s YouTube page… it’s quite entertaining and amazing… plenty of “good fun” there, too. Party on!

[brunobg]

@Wingnut if you like to play with animations you might like this PG I ran into: https://playground.babylonjs.com/#AJA5J6#5

[Vousk-prod]

Yup, of course my company has a website.

Hmm, pretty sure I won’t have time for the Xmas contest…

He he, I prefer the version with navy hat. FYI positionning is ok on my mobile phone.

Aardman is great and invented a lot, but there also are other very intersting, imaginative and talented studio out there (LaikaEntertainment for instance).

Time to sleep now. See you!

PS: Oh, you may want to know the url of our website https://hapticmedia.fr

[Vousk-prod]

Sorry, no christmas tree on it, though…

[Wingnut]

@brunobg Hey, thx for the armature anims! Cooooool. That 4th one is doing the world famous “chicken dance”, isn’t it? heh. Nice. Thx for those… I love wiggling armatures… and sometimes wiggling girls, too. I once wrote a song about “armature girls”… but we better leave that subject for another day.

@Vousk-prod … when you referenced Laika, I thought “I bet it’s all computer animation”… BUT NO! They do stop-motion, and thus… they can do clay (and mud) (and Skittles), too. https://www.laika.com

YAY! I am worried about stop-motion becoming a lost art… usurped by CG. On the commercial side, it IS probably more expensive to do stop-motion than it is to do CG… as beefy hardware and nice software come down in price and up in performance. But, like vacuum tubes and vinyl records, SOMEBODY will keep it alive. Traditionalists.

Isn’t “nurbs”… an attempt at making CG… clay-mation-like? I never took the time to really investigate nurbs… but at first-glance, that’s what it looked-like to me.

Coraline was Laika, eh? Nice.

I love all of it. If I had unlimited budget… boy… I would… well I would… well I dunno what I would do… probably give it away to starving kids. But I’d dream of massive storytelling empowerment, anyway.

[Vousk-prod]

Yep, a true stopmotion studio!! Love them.

Nice lyrics, mister L.W.

[Evgeni_Popov]

Sorry, I flagged wrongly the message from @Wingnut as spam and I can’t unflag it…

If someone knows how to unflag it I would be grateful…

[Deltakosh]

All good!