You can download the example file linked below to try out a few basic animations.
Multiple Animations
You can see in the screenshot below that Bottango supports multiple animations in a scene file. In the Animations panel in the upper right of the interface you can see that I've selected head nod shake animation here and that it is in looping mode.
Playback Preview
Select the animation and hit play -- you'll see a real-time preview in the software.
Hardware Playback
With the Metro ESP32-S2 selected and the driver live, you'll see the real hardware playback.
Add one gnome...
Realtime Puppeteering!
Setting keyframes by hand is a great way to animate pose-to-pose, but you can also get a bit more performance oriented by enabling direct game controller support in Bottango.
With a USB game controller plugged in (I used a PS4 controller), go to the Animate section and click on Live Input Control Scheme. You can pick your controller and set the inputs to drive different joints in the rig.
Here, I picked the Left Stick X to drive lower_bracket_joint
and Right Stick Y to drive the tilt_servo_joint
.
Capture Session
Click the Practice button to test out the controls. When you're ready you can record a performance capture by pressing the red record button and then puppeteering with the controller.
When the timeline runs to the end (or you press pause) the capture animation will be fit to a sparse set of points which you can then edit on the graph editor as usual. Pretty amazing!
Page last edited January 20, 2025
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