Question Re: Applicability

Bongo
1

Hi. Sorry in advance, if this is a really dumb question!

I want a way to take Rhino models that I’ve built, and animate them. These models would have some similarities in dimensions (positions of major joints, etc.) but would otherwise be different. Imagine, for example, multi-jointed G.I. Joe toys that are all alike in key positions of things like knee joints, etc.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to take the Rhino geometry and have it output a series of animation frames from a common set of keyframes, so that I can design the keyframes once, then use them over and over again.

For example, let’s say I’m designing a robot arm with Styling A vs. Styling B: the two arms’ joint locations and core dimensions are the same, but there may be differences otherwise. I want them to both do exactly the same animation, and I don’t want to have to rebuild all of the keyframes; I want to iterate on the visual design freely and then test the animation, etc.

Can Bongo do this, using non-rendered control objects, etc.? I’d really like to stay in Rhino for this project, for production-speed reasons.

Again, sorry if this was a stupid question; it just isn’t clear in the marketing materials whether Bongo would be suitable for this use case.

2

I think you probably can do it especially if the dimensions don’t change. I think non-rendered objects like points or lines to define the base animation would be the best way to try. We call those proxy objects in the Bongo documentation. You can add the “real” objects as children of those proxies and replace them as needed. There’s a section on it here in the documentation:

I would also suggest trying the evaluation version of Bongo and seeing if you can get a simpler version of what you described working first.

3

Excellent! I’m already starting to see places where I’d like automation like this to save me some production time!