Animation Retargeting / Color Management / Misc

Animation Retargeting

This is something I've really wanted to do for a while, and it turned out much better than I expected: I've implemented an animation retargeting system, which allows you to map the skeleton of one model onto another. Effectively this means that you can switch out the model you've used for one of your animations with a completely different one very easily.

The system is very versatile and also works if the target model has completely different proportions (as shown in the video), a different skeletal structure/hierarchy or mismatching bones, the skeletons only need to be reasonably similar (i.e. you're probably not gonna have much luck mapping a humanoid skeleton onto a cockroach ;) ).

https://pragma-engine.com/share/bandicam_2020-10-15_17-01-39-444.mp4 

I've also written a tool that can do the bone mapping automatically, however it still has a few kinks to be worked out, so for now you still have to do some of the mapping manually. Doing that is very easy, however, all you have to do is select the source and target models, and then find a match for each of the major bones in the skeletons:

https://pragma-engine.com/share/bandicam_2020-10-15_20-12-14-495.mp4 

(Of course you only have to do it once for each model pair.)

It's not available in PFM yet, but it should pop up in one of the next updates!

Color Management

The Filmic-Blender color transform is now available when rendering with Cycles through PFM directly, and is now, in fact, the default. I've also added the same contrast options that are available in Blender:

(From left to right: Very low contrast, Medium contrast, Very high contrast)

If you're familiar with OpenColorIO, you can also add other custom OCIO color transforms for use in PFM now!

Misc

• Light Editing

This was already added in a recent preview version update, but I don't think I've mentioned it here yet; light sources can now (finally) be created and edited: http://pragma-engine.com/share/bandicam_2020-10-15_20-52-40-871.mp4

• Even more VR rendering options

There are new Cycles preset options for VR rendering available (such as typical VR resolutions for common HMDs), and the render viewport can now display equirectangular/VR images as a 360° view, or as a flat image: https://i.imgur.com/ydQBp1H.mp4 

• You can now export the current map as glTF via a new option in the menu bar. This is more or less equivalent to the asset export command I've added a while back, however this option now also exports the cameras and light sources in the scene. (No animation data, however.)

Additionally, I've been working on a small side-project in my spare time, which I'm hoping to use to get some more funding for the Filmmaker project. It's closely related to the Filmmaker itself and I'll be launching it in just a few days; there'll be another post about it then :).