here goes...

[JesperCJ]

First of all, thanx for your contributions to a wonderful tool!
Honestly, I'm writing here, to see if we could get in contact, as I would like to know, if you are interessted in programming another tool. I will pay for it, and you can share it with everybody.

I hope that you email me :-)

Best, Jesper

[aresdevo]

Hello @JesperCJ, I feel flattered by your offer but I don't think I'm qualified to embark on a serious project. I'm just a character animator that wants to learn how to code. This addon started just as a small test, I decided to challenge myself and do something useful while learning instead of one of those random scripts they make you do in some tutorials. As I learned more I kept adding stuff to it but it has been a struggle. I'm not really a coder, so I would feel super anxious working on somebody else's project, much more if there is money involved (I don't even ask for donations for the same reason).

I'm sure if a real programmer looks at my code it would have a lot to say.

Thanks again, and sorry I can't help you, but at least for now I want to keep the code learning process a hobby, free of any anxiety.

I hope you understand.

[JesperCJ]

Hi there AresDevo, first of all, thank you for replying that fast! :-)

Secondly, thanks for a wonderful piece of software. It's amazing when creative people go hybrid, and start jamming code together to make stuff that often is exactly what many creative guys need - because you fully understand what it is that you are missing without the tool. Pretty code - or not.

I've been doing similar stuff back in the days - I did some max scripting, when I used 3dsmax for ages. I promise you, the code wasn't pretty, but it got the job done. I've been doing 3D-animation since the early 90's, so I've seen a bit. Transitioning to Blender a year ago was a genuine blessing (me and my twin brother keeps going on asking eachother "do you know how much I love this software?"), and next when I started to bump into people doing addons, I was thrilled of the level of commitment, and clever ingenuity - no matter the state/shape of the code :-)

If you for some reason, decide to give it a go (paid or unpaid, I don't care - just wanna find some clever guy, who would like to take a stab at it - and if it fails, it's fine), don't hesitate to mail me.

I can just shortly describe, what it is, I'm looking for (and if you get tempted, I'll explain more in detail of course how and why):

1. Why can't animators align/snap one bone to another (loc/rot/scale seperately or together) when in pose mode - when actually doing animation??? I've been googling for ages, and only stuff concerning rigging and modelling comes up regarding snapping.

2. The ability to, when animating, translate a bone - without affecting children. Especially in the games industry, where you need a lot of structure in your animation pipeline, sometimes, you need to re-orient a parentbone in an animation, without affecting the rest of the child hierarchy.

3. "Hold" Location animation = When turning this feature on, you should be able to offset-rotate a bone in a given animation, but the location animation should be kept (you'll have to do some re-calculation of the location curves as I see it).

Anyways, nice to talk to you, Best, Jesper
My stuff: www.jespercolding.dk

[aresdevo]

oh... 3dsMax!. That was one of the first 3D software I ever used back when it was called 3D Studio (that might give away my age).

In regard to the things you would want Blender to do, in point 1 I have an idea of how to implement it. I will give it a try

Point 2 sounds interesting and not something I have ever needed in my animation workflow, but doesn't seem too hard to implement. I will give it a try too.

Point 3 has been something I have been wanting to implement in my addon for a while now. There is a tool called AnimOffset inside Animaide that kind of does that, but what you want is that if you have a walk for example, if you rotate the character he then would walk in that new direction. It would be animOffset on steroids. The thing about it is that to be able to do it I need to better understand how to work with matrices and I guess I didn't pay enough attention in class back in my school days because it has proven to be too hard for me. I'll keep trying though :P