Features
UX, rigging, skinning and animation highlights
GENERAL
Spinner
Designed as the centerpiece of akeytsu, this circular widget is your transform hub. Placed it close to your model and focus on your motion without distractions, tedious camera moves and misselections. Depending on selection the Spinner displays classic MRS, IK pole vector, RF-specific or blendshape controls.
Direct Model Interaction
It is our view that animating should feel like posing a marionette. We favour direct interaction with your model whenever possible instead of complex dialogs filled with parameters. Manipulate joint controls and edit skin influences while painting with ease through our viewport picking system.
Auto Rig
Designed for efficiency and comfort, akeytsu Auto-Rig lets you generate your biped character rig in less a few minutes. Load your character, place 5 hot points, choose the number of joints joints for spine and fingers. You're done. Skeleton, weights and controls have been generated automatically.
CAMERAS
Create your cinematics in akeytsu or load existing ones to finetune your animations with us. Cameras can be imported, created, rigged and tweaked in-app before being exported through FBX. Select from a variety of framing and layout pre-sets to work in the best conditions.
Non-destructive worfklow
Made from scratch for 3D animation work, akeytsu is much more permissive than other packages. Go back and forth rigging and animation whenever needed to insert a new joint, reorient an existing one or add a new controller. We'll offset everything to preserve as much as we can from what you built so far.
RIGGING
Light Rig
We made rigging easier with a single skeleton to work with and user-friendly controllers set up with minimum effort. Start with a blank page or Auto Rig your character to get a headstart. Our controllers are designed with extreme care so that they don't get in the way and can be added to the rig in no time.
DYNAMIC IK-FK Hybrid Solver
A single skeleton to rule them all blending the boundaries between Inverse and Forward Kinematics. Just right-click our IK or RF handles to switch between the two animation modes and manipulate IK-chains accordingly. More reactive controls allowing greater creative freedom.
Joint Light Display
We revisited traditional skeleton display with a more pleasing to the eye and easier to work with flat design. Joint size changes depending on density and everything can be customized. In hidden bone mode, little nibs will point towards the parent for selected joints.
Easy Reverse Foot
Our Reverse Foot controller is set up in a handful of clicks. Bank, twist and roll angles can directly be tweaked in the Spinner along with the hip-ankle Pole Vector rotation. A neat Snap or Align feature let you refine foot poses with even more ease. Dynamic IK/FK solving also applies to this controller.
SPACE SWITCHING
Space Switching also called Dynamic Parenting lets you dyynamically link a joint to another so that they behave as if they had a parent-child relationship. In akeytsu you'll just have to declare which objects can be used as Dynamic Parents and key them as a new Space for selection in Timebar.
Interactive Blendshapes
Load blendshape meshes in akeytsu to create corrective or more advanced blendshape controllers. With facial animation we implemented directional mouse controls so that you can associate different blendshapes with mouse directions and mould the face of your character according to desire.
Mirroring Tools
Whether you are creating your skeleton, skinning your character or creating a cycle animation you can mirror what you do on the other side of your character and save half the work. We'll just ask you to name your joints with _L or _R to to understand where they are and mirror effectively.
SKINNING
Duo Skin
Skin Bind is performed in two consecutive passes in akeytsu. We'll determine rigid zones for each joint before we smooth out influences with our delta-mush-powered algorithm. Rigid zones can be edited in a base layer to recompute fall-offs before you resort to skin painting.
Skin Painting
Free paint your characters with all the necessary tools at your disposal. Use brushes in combination with Skin Atelier and Picker to transfer weights smartly. Akeytsu elevates skin painting to an artform. You don't have to rely on complex and convoluted dialogs. You just select and paint.
Update Skinned Mesh
Load your revised 3D model in akeytsu to replace the work-in-progress used to build rig and animations. We'll transfer skin weights and preserve all the rest. Especially useful if you want to update your model topology, UV Coordinates, Vertex colors, Materials, and/or Textures.
ANIMATION
RETARGETING
Load any given animation and retarget it on a different character it was created for. We make it work as long as they have a similar body structure. Not necessarily the exact same skeleton. Matching hierarchies is also much easier with us as you only have to map one side.
Smart Cyclemaker
Cyclemaker automates the creation of your cycles. From a handful of "first step" keyframes, you can generate a complete loop. This cuts in half the the time needed to create symmetric cycles. We also provide the flexibility to tweak them with a neat Cycle Side function that replicates changes to the other step of your animation.
Animation layers
We support both override and additive blending modes for animation layers. Opacity can be adjusted using sliders in the Mixer. We offer additional tools to duplicate, merge and extract layers from existing ones. Plus audio files can be loaded and placed on their dedicated tracks.
Breakdown Pose Editor
Inspired by tweenMachine, Breakdown Pose Editor lets you interpolate selected joints/controllers with poses of previous or next key. Most often only available as plug-in in other solutions, it is natively integrated in akeytsu. All set up and functional with impeccable integration into the Spinner.
Curveboard
Fully integrated into the viewport, use this powerful tool to select, pan, resize and move curves on a single screen while keeping the focus on your character. Everything can be edited during playback to iterate as you go. Linear, spline, stepped and clamp interpolation modes are available.
Stacker
The Stacker is inspired by traditional X-sheets and tailored to a 3D workflow. With it you will be able to easily tweak timings, add or remove keyframes and activate ghosts. The stacker facilitates the creation of your cycles and will be a treasure to manage a large volume of keys.