MonsterMash – A Single-View Approach to Casual 3D Modeling and Animation

Procedural animation tools are such an exciting area.

We've had some glimpses of what can be done but nothing modern.

Over a decade ago, I was excited that spore's creature creator would inspire a real authoring tool but nothing seems to really have gotten there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRr3lgckIAM

Unity is our flash-like game authoring platform of today and it's animation tools are nothing like what we once had. Flash was simpler and more fun 20 years ago.

We've really lost something here. Authoring in this area has become less accessible.

This reminds me a bit of Teddy by Takeo Igarashi [1], which turns out is from 1999 already. I remember playing with that when I was younger.

[1]: https://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/teddy/teddy.htm

This is such a heartwarming work, finally some good use for all the HW, a great, easy to use tool for story telling. It's also great that you chose to make this a desktop app, and facilitate sharing and exchange with files. Although, You could have packed all the data into single binary blob for easier sharing.

Looks great. Any chance this could make its way into Blender? That would be really nice. The grease pencil tool could be used for the drawing.

The monsters and other creatures in those videos are super adorable. I can’t wait for the program to be released and to try it myself. I am also hopeful that it might be open source even.

Wow, this is incredible. The closest analog I can think of with widespread support is 3D sculpting along the lines of ZBrush. Blender is fantastic, but the lack of this kind of tooling has always made asset creation enough of a commitment to put me off from trying to approach game-making casually. I guess "casual game-making" is still an oxymoron for now, but I think tools like this could change that.

This is super cool and I would pay Maya-level prices for it. For indie game development, tools like this are gold.

Although MonsterMash is more advanced, this reminded me of Martin Hash's Animation Master [1].

[1] https://www.hash.com/software-14-en

This was a pure joy to behold. There are several current modeling features approaching this level of interactivity, but none this fine. Add mesh denoising and subdivision and this is a production workflow quality tool ;)

Very nice. It's interesting to see the flowing and organic shape of the models. I'd be curious to see some meshes though to be honest. But this makes me want to play with it!

Gawd I want this, I want to play with this, I want to hack this, I want this...