Wish List for Bongo 3

Added.

Thank you Marika!

I have been doing flythrus by animating the camera. I prefer the way animating a camera works. I wish that the target point could be animated separate from the eye point. I would like for the target point to follow a path. Creates very smooth animations.

The FBX import would rock too.

I would also appreciate FBX import (of iClone)

How about an ‘auto-banking / follow’ feature for cameras that are on a path?

It’s really weird to see a camera go around a curve and always point the same direction. It can be very time-consuming and challenging to manually add camera rotation keyframes. In other animation apps, this feature is standard.

KEYFRAMES : TWO PARTS

  1. Position / rotation / scale keyframes should be unique colors (or shapes) and/or on separate tracks in the timeline. Right now they look the same – and are usually ‘stacked’ on top of each other. By making them look different --and selected individually – they would be much easier to use. See how AfterEffects handles this beautifully with separate horizontal tracks for each position / rotation / scale attribute.

  2. When you add a new ‘empty’ keyframe, you should be able to specify WHAT its for; position, rotation [X,Y or Z], scale [X,Y or Z], etc. The ‘Pre-calculated’ option does not work reliably. The next attribute I change (like position) should then turn the Pre-Calculated keyframe into a position keyframe (with zero value) but more often than not the animation starts all the way back at frame zero… which has other identical-looking keyframes stacked on top of each other!

We actually do have a public wishlist/issue tracker for all of our products now. Bongo’s issue tracker is at
http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issues/BO

Is this link the preferred and official place to make a request? And, should I go there to re-post my two excellent requests from above?

Using either this site or the site at the link I provided is fine for making requests. I was simply pointing out where all of these issues eventually end up. Many times it is best to make the request here so other people can weigh in on their opinions

Steve,
Looks like the items marked as wishes doesn’t show up if you aren’t logged in.

Please post the wishes here, I’ll move/copy them to the system.

You need to change the visibility for issues that are okay to be viewed outside of McNeel as ‘visible by all’. We do this for most new Rhino issues nowadays. @andy can show you where this control is in youtrack.

A big step forward would be to make the IK workflow much more intuitive:

I think it’s a lot of programming work, but it is it worth. The current workflow is good for nerds. :wink:

Any thoughts on how how to make Bingo render to KeyShot? …or is this the same as my wish to support FBX export?

I just realized I had called Bongo Bingo, I’m sorry, but not very sorry about that :crazy_face:

We do not use Keyshot anymore. Yet, more than ever we need an FBX export for anything that happens in Bongo.

I just saw this post:

All new features in Bongo 3 are very exciting and very welcome, but no feature IMO comes higher in priority than animated FBX export.

Can you please confirm this is coming to Bongo 3. And I don’t mean that it’s been added to the wish list of things that might or might not be implemented.

I need to know that this is as much of a priority for your team as it is for mine. Otherwise we need to start looking for an alternative for Bongo right now. I cannot wait 4 more years. Not even 1 more year.

We are producing animated AR content today. And we are doing that outside of Rhino/Bongo because there are no exports that allow us to downstream motion/animation to any other platform. We are really interested in having this all done inside Rhino, but we need this more than any other Bongo feature. First.

Thanks,

Gustavo

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FBX export is something I’m in the very early stages of working on. It’s a fairly large project and will take some time to get working well.

What platform are you exporting the animation data to? What is the actual data you expect to retrieve downstream? What do the animations look like that you usually make? Are they primarily just keyframed positions, rotations, and scalings? Or do you make heavy use of inverse kinematics and morphing?

There’s features Bongo has, features the FBX format supports, and the intersection between the two that we can work with. A little more information from you can help make sure this works the way you need it to.

Thanks,

Joshua

smaller time bar of UI

hi Joshua,

being able to export Bongo animation is a MUST for our needs (as Gustavo mentioned above , this is a deal breaker right now).

We mainly interesting in exporting animations to AR. Right now we exploring Sketchfab, but we also doing it by manually creating .glTf (.glb) or .USDZ files.
I think two main file formats Bongo should support is .fbx and .abc (Alembic , http://www.alembic.io/).

I also want to point out other scenario where Export to .fbx or .abc will be usefull - Rendering (for example export to Octane Standalone render ).

Regarding types of animation:
Even being able to export basic keyframed positions/rotation animation would be a great start!
And next step would be to support more advanced features, like morphing (we can do it in MODO by using Alembic now).

Hope this feedback helps,

Igor

hi @Joshua_Kennedy @andy @marika_almgren and team,

I wanted to follow up on Igor’s requests here (he works in my team).

We continue to have an ever more pressing need to import/export animation: basic animation of objects/cameras moving as FBX + animations including including morphed data as Alembic.

We are doing a lot of anthropometrics studies for wearable products and we need to model/pose/animate/render/show our designs on people: on various heads’s sizes (we achieve this with morphs mapped to target head sizes), on body/chests/etc., also same for grabbing and gripping objects on morphed/rigged/animated hands. We do not expect to have our rigs (Modo now and Blender soon) to transfer over, but any animation with points deformation (achieved via those rigs or via manual morph maps/blendshapes) should be able to come into Rhino where we are trying to do our design work.

In summary: I think you should give way more priority to be friendly to professional animations practices, exchange formats and software, so we can bring that work over when we do professional industrial design work in Rhino.

Right now what I see you are building it’s cute stuff, but not something that will replace a professional workflow. I really hope you can give priority to what pays the bills first, instead of creating more tools for semi-hobby projects. I’ll be happy to have a session with your team to explain/answer any questions you might have to show you why this is so important for us.

Thanks,

Gustavo

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I understand the need for import/export. It’s unlikely that Bongo would be the beginning and end for an animation workflow as is currently the case. I’ve managed to get FBX export working as you’ve described, but it’s still in its early stages. There are still a handful of outstanding issues that need resolved before it can be made public for testing. So it might be a bit before you see it. I hadn’t given the import too much thought but I’ll start experimenting with that soon.

Morphing data has me curious though. It looks like the FBX format supports morphing, and I’ve been under the impression that Alembics baking is more useful for simulations and rendering. Is there a limitation from Blender or Modo forcing you to use Alembic as an export for morphing? Are Blender and Modo the only other tools you’re using? Are you planning to render the animation inside of Rhino? Do you need Alembic export as well? Where are you hoping to send the animations after Bongo/Rhino?

-Joshua

Hi Joshua,

Thanks for the update. FBX makes sense for us to exchange work-in progress projects across multiple applications. However we also need Alembic to shared baked morph animation to things like Sketchfab, and AR uses in .USDZ and .GLTF.

If we have an animation that includes morphs (the meshes themselves change) we need Alembic to show that. Here’s an example in Sketchfab:

The AR landscape is still very early days, and some things are supported in iOS, and some other things are supported in Android.

Currently you can see this model above in AR with morphs working if you look at it in Android, not yet supported in iOS, but we think it’s also coming.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

Gustavo

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