Bongo Curves Editor / Keyframe Editor Wishes

Bongo
1

Hello Everyone,

As I have been using Bongo to do architectural walk-throughs over the past two weeks. The software is great, I’ve found a really powerful, efficient and precise workflow for making walk-through animations. I understand Bongo is still under development, so I just wanted to explain how I’ve been using the software and post a couple of wishes for future releases ( mostly for the developer’s reference but perhaps someone replies with how to achieve this in the current version)

The process I’ve been using is as follows:
0) I am making a single continuous animation composed of 10 animation sets.

  1. Create a template animation set, establish the rendering settings and fps, and a location to render the files. (this avoids having to enter all of this information 10 times at the end)
    1.5) Duplicate the template animation set, and rename it for the first movement.
  2. Draw a curve representing a path that someone would walk through the architectural project. These are deliberately NOT fly-through animations, we want to see what the experience is like from a person’s point of view, so the path of the camera needs to be tightly constrained.
  3. Create a constraint camera to path constraint.
  4. Advance through the constrained path using the Bongo Timeline, and draw key target points along the path of the animation.
  5. connect these target points with a spline
  6. create a constrain target to path constraint.
  7. Advance through the timeline again, creating parametrically defined keyframes to match the camera path / speed constraint with the target path / speed constraint using the keyframe editor in combination with the curve editor.
  8. Duplicate the template Animation set & repeat steps 1-7.

My WISHES are mostly for step 7:

  • I really wish that the curve editor and the keyframe editor were just one tool. Right now switching between keyframes in the keyframe editor doesn’t update selections in the curve editor, so sometimes I edit parameters of constraint in the keyframe editor… only to find that I’m looking at the wrong curve in the curve editor. I really wish the previews would update synchronously.
  • I also wish it were possible to set the default tension for curves, or perhaps that this default tension was a function of the number of time steps between keyframes. Whenever I create precise camera motions, the linear interpolation feels very rigid, but anything that has curves creates so much tension that it disturbs the camera motion (the target will go forwards, and then backwards, and then forwards again between just two keyframes for example, because the tension is so high that there is a ‘ripple’ in the curve).
  • I wish that there were an ‘undo’ button on the curve editor. I cannot count the number of times I’ve made a mistake and ruined the precisely tailored motion I’d curated because I changed the wrong parameter.

That’s all for now!

Best,
Alexander

1 Like
2

Hi Alexander,

thanks for your feedback. I have added this to the Bongo wishlist.

Regards.
Lars

3

I totally second @Alexander_Jacobson in his detailed comments and frustrations. Thank you Alexander.
I would like to add a couple of related issues if I may:

I’ve used animation sets extensively lately and there are indeed some bugs / annoyances

1.- Copy and paste, import or insert from another file that has also animation sets, imports its own sets into the current model wich creates confusion and duplicated names if such names already existed in the outside file.
The only way to avoid this is to use -Saveas, -Export, or -Savesmall command line (note the hyphen) and switch “SavePluginData” option to “NO” but then I loose other plugin data that might be embedded.
The inclusion of animation sets should be optional.

2.- Related to the above, it would be great to have an import / export animation set option either individually or all at once.
Mybe right click in the set and have a “Export” command to save it to disk or an icon in the toolbar similar to the ones found in the Rhino named views tab to import them from another 3dm file or from an xml, write them all to xml, … etc

3.- A nice-to-have option to dock the animation set window without having to close it. The animation set is applied when I checkmark the animation name anyways.

4.- Animated camera keyframes are currently not saved with the animation set. Not sure whether this is by design or a bug. Luckily I found how to read /write the View keyframes to a xml file which allows me to bring back the animated camera when I switch anim. sets.

5.- When I load the camera set with the “Read from file” command of above point 4, the keyframes don’t initially show up in the timeline unless I right-click on the timeline, choose “collapse keyframes” and chose it again to remove the collapsed status.

I hope that this issues can be addressed in the next update of this great plug-in.
Thanks
Juan