[RELEASED] Flux - The Cinematic Editor For Unity

Hi,

I've been a member of this community for 9y and finally decided to launch a tool for Unity.

It is called Flux, it is a cinematic editor that is made to be tightly integrated into Unity - specially the Animation system -, and it was built from the ground up thinking about performance, usability, extensibility and determinism.

Here's the intro video:

I'd love to know what are your thoughts, comments, etc.

EDIT: It has been released! http://u3d.as/content/nuno-afonso/flux
EDIT 2: You can try it before buying, grab it at http://www.fluxeditor.com/try.html

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Here's a video showing how that scene was created:

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Here's a few more videos, covering object animation, camera animation, and character animation workflow:

 

I have been looking for something just like this! I see the team license on your website is $399, I am only interested in a single license. Hopefully that will be significantly lower.

Before I was using Animator, but it's UI and support are a bit lacking.

I am excited to see what becomes of this.

 

Hi ChadM,

1 user license is planned to go for $95 (hopefully UT will accept the tool soon, it is in review).

I'd be very interested to know what kind of use you'd give it, if you want to share feel free to get in touch directly and we'll talk a bit about it. ;-]

Regards,
Nuno Afonso

 

Hi, Great job.

 

The Asset Store has accepted Flux, and it is now available! Yay!

Asset Store Link: http://u3d.as/content/nuno-afonso/flux

A trial package will be available soon so that you can try Flux before you buy, although I'm pretty sure you'll be happy with it ;-]

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

You can now try it before buying (requires 4.5)!

http://www.fluxeditor.com/try.html

Let me know what you think ;-]

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

New time lapse video on creating a cut scene with Flux:

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Thanks for demo.

 

I tried the demo and I'm very impressed . This is an awesome asset!
The emphasis is on animation but I guess with the API I could create my own events, am I right?
(It would fit perfect in my workflow if I could create keyframes in the timeline that calls c# events in other scripts. Do you think it is possible right out of the box?)

I had also some usability suggestions:
In the Flux inspector I can set the From and To values with a button from the current position.It would be cool to change the position(or whatever property) of the gameObject in the opposite direction (Set the position of the gameobject to the current "From" position for example).
It also would be great to be able to drag&drop or copy&paste events to&from another track of the same event type. (Or at least have copy&paste on the same track)

Great work!

 

thats looks great!!! great jo u done!!!

 

First of all sorry for answering so late, keep forgetting that for some reason I don't get email notifications on the thread, need to check what's up with that!

Yes, you can create your own events, you just extend from FEvent (or any other class that comes from FEvent), I'll hook up one example in the website showing how easy it is. You can also customize how the event gets drawn (e.g. the Audio event draws the waveform on it).

Thanks, will add that soon. Current build is going to be focused on more events, specially trying to have sequences that can call other sequences, but in a way that also will allow you to see what the other sequences do in preview as you scrub, not as easy thing to do but I think in the next couple of weeks I may have it ;-]

Yes, I'm hoping to improve copy and pasting, probably not in the next build though, but I'll keep you guys updated!

Thanks for the motivational words guys, it is good to know something you put in so much time is appreciated ;-] If you have any more questions or think about some kind of events you think would be useful, please let me know!

BTW the price point for Flux is now settled at $50!

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Flux was chosen for a 24h sale on the Asset Store, it is 50% off! ;-]

You can try it for free on http://www.fluxeditor.com/try.html

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Thanks for giving trial ver.

 

Greetings,
I picked Flux up yesterday during the sale and I'm pretty excited because it looks like it will help solve a problem I've been working on. However, I get a compile error when I try to build the project (note, the compile error occurs only when building. the package imported and compiled file). The error is:

error CS1061: Type `UnityEngine.AnimationClip' does not contain a definition for `isLooping' and no extension method `isLooping' of type `

The cause seems to be lines 87 and 110 of the FPlayAnimationEvent.cs script where the _animationClip.isLooping flag is being checked. Again, the really weird thing is that this error is only thrown when trying to build the project once the Flux asset package has been imported regardless of whether or not any of the Flux scripts are actually being used.

My setup is:
Unity 4.5.3f3 on Windows
Build Target is Android, Minimum API: Android 2.3.3 'Gingerbread'

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

@barrenjunk pls ping me at support@fluxeditor.com . Atm I can't verify this, but as soon as I'm able to I'll reply to you via email.

 

For anybody else having the same issue, seems that that API is being stripped at build time. I reported it to UT, and resubmitted a Flux hot fix (1.2.1).

Although in the meantime, please do the following replacements on FPlayAnimationEvent.cs:

Line 87:
#if UNITY_EDITOR
if( IsAnimationEditable() || _animationClip.isLooping )
#else
if( IsAnimationEditable() )
#endif

Line 108:
#if UNITY_EDITOR
return _animationClip.isLooping ? Length : Mathf.RoundToInt(_animationClip.length * _animationClip.frameRate) - Length;
#else
return Length;
#endif

 

Hi,
I bought and played with Flux and extended it for my needs. Really top-notch tool!!!

I have some things that would be nice to have (or I'm not aware of ):

Deactive/activate a whole track or a single event.
Labeling of a event box in the editor(or coloring). (Right now everything is just blue and no further information is displayed)
Right mouse click support for creating events/tracks or other stuff. (Would be a huge usabillity enhancement)
Mouse scroll wheel support for zooming into the timeline.

 

How do you guys installed the demo version?

-UP
note: I tried removing the ".zip" and then in unity import custom package

 

AWESOME.

 

Hi, thanks for getting Flux, glad to see you're liking it ;-]

Hmmmm I doubt I'd ever add a disable event, because I'm not sure there's a strong case for it to exist globally. However, it may be interesting to have a disable track (e.g. if the user clicks a button a track would be active / inactive), I'll give it some thought.

Not sure what you mean by labelling the event box, if it is printing text on all events (i.e. what you call the event box), then I'm not planning on adding it. The idea is that such labelling would be done in the track.

That being said, I am atm doing a major rewrite (for Unity 5) that will add a "comment track", which will be a special track because it is going to be always visible at the top. The idea is that you can add a comment about what that area of the track is doing, and it is something that won't use any processing at runtime, purely for editor use.

Coloring is _semi_ there. The reason why I haven't fully implemented colouring is because I'm not sure how it should be. I _doubt_ it should be per event, I'm thinking it should be per track. What's annoying is that if I expose that in the editor (e.g. you could select a track and set it's color), it will add more save data, so I'm not sure if it is worth it to have it customisable or if it can just be something defined only on the editor level (e.g. changing the code if you want a different color on an event, or maybe have some kind of "thing" exposed in the Flux preferences that let you define a color per event type). But if you guys have nice use cases, please share them ;-]

Right click for tracks I don't think is necessary, since the timeline header has the + button. As for events, I'll probably revisit that when I figure out a good way to do copy paste.

Thanks for your feedback ;-]

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Hi,

When you unzip it gives you a .unitypackage. You simply need to import that to the project, it will create a folder Assets/Flux with everything inside (in OS X I'm pretty sure you can just drag and drop the .unitypackage on Unity, probably will work too on Windows).

Just make sure you have 4.5.0+.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Strange I am using 4.5.2f1. but i can not install it.
By "import" do you mean "import custom package"?

-UP

 

Yes, Assets -> Import Package -> Custom Package...

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Heya Nuno.

I picked up Flux a few days ago, and I'm happy with it so far, mostly. However, I'm having some issues with character animations. In your animation workflow video, you write that looping animations can be extended beyond the end of their frames, and will then loop, What I experience, is that animations when "stretched" simply play slower.
Am I using it wrong ? Is there a manual I could use ?

 

Hi @larskroll,

There's 2 types of animation handling in Flux currently. There's editable animations" and non-editable.

ATM, Flux assumes that if the animation is editable that you created it in Unity and you want it to handle it stretching. if it is non-editable, it means that it comes from an animation package (e.g. fbx you exported).

So my guess is that you are setting an editable animation (i.e. something you created in Unity or a duplicated animation from an FBX) and not the FBX directly. Is that the case?

That being said, for the next update (which will be Unity 5 only, I'm afraid) it will handle this differently. The main reason for this is because Unity still forces you to duplicate FBX animations in order to add events to it, but I can see why it would also interest in other cases.

BTW, I'd also love to know what's your use case. ATM the only use case I heard was duplicating the FBXs for adding events inside Unity, if your case is different please let me know.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Hi,

Just bought this. Can one drop markers (in xyz space) in a scene for a camera or object to follow?
(Usequencer and Aperture Custcene use this methodology)

thanks,

Shwa

 

Hi Nuno

OK. I see. That actually quite severely F's my workflow unfortunately.... :-(
I use character animations purchased from Mixamo: In that workflow, what I get is generally just the animation. I think there is a way for me to get a full fbx, but this is kind of a pain....

Is there somewhere in the source I should start looking to fix this ? I dont think I'll be the only one with the issue: I mean, buying anims from mixamo isn't particularly exotic.

 

actually. Now that I think about it, it isn't all that much of a huge deal, since its only the looping anims. I guess I'll figure it out

 

@shwa sorry for not seeing this, and thx for sending a message directly. I still don't know why I'm not getting warnings from this thread.

ATM Flux doesn't have that kind of support, it is fully animation driven. I'm planning to improve the way Camera animation is done for the next update (i.e. Unity 5 only), however there have been multiple problems with the upgrade to Unity 5 because of Mecanim API changes, so things are going slower than I'd wish.

For that kind of workflow, I'd suggest using the positions tweens, i.e. you create a tween position track and each one of those will interpolate between 2 points. ATM it doesn't have markers in the scene, but I'll look into that in the future.

Does that work for you atm?

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Sorry about that. ATM I already did a workaround for some guys that fools Flux into thinking that it can't change the track, however it requires that you mark the animation as looping. Does that work for you? If so, please replace the function IsAnimationEditable in FPlayAnimationEvent.cs with:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. public bool IsAnimationEditable()
3. {
4. #if UNITY_EDITOR
5.             return _animationClip == null || (((_animationClip.hideFlags & HideFlags.NotEditable) == 0) && !_animationClip.isLooping);
6. #else
7.             return _animationClip == null || ((_animationClip.hideFlags & HideFlags.NotEditable) == 0);
8. #endif
9. }

You are right that it is more common that I expected, the problem was the workflow of the first users of Flux that threw me on one direction.

I hope this solves your problem at least for now, but rest assured that the Unity 5 Flux update will handle this better in a lot of ways.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Hi again Nuno

Thank you for the fix.

I have been somewhat frustrated with Flux. I had actually posted a two star review on the asset store, but you have been good at delivering fast feedback here on the forum, so i withdrew the bad review. Here's my points of gripe for your info:

1: Flux was crashing, taking Unity with it, when I did something wrong with the animation scrubber. I had a character with several animations on it, and when I scrubbed that the wrong way, Unity crashed. Sorry, but no good repro case.
2: Pressing ALT doesn't give me any handles where animations meet. Maybe because I am on windows ?
3: Your documentation is very lacking. You describe only the very surface of workflow.
4: when I run my scene, and return, the sequence I was working on is no longer selected in the sequence editor window.

 

ok ...odd... now, after a break, those handles DO show up ...

 

arg. and when I change the length of an animation event, the SPEED of the source animation is changed behind my back, causing sideeffects wherever else I might use that animation ?!?! I must really be doing something wrong here, since noone else is complaining ?

 

OK. Changed your fix request to simply returning "false" on "isEditable". I cannot fathom why you chose to do it that way. Now, at least my animations won't be messed up. I'll let you know how that works with my workflow.

 

Adding this to Wish List for now.
Oh, wait you have free version.
I like this kind of developers.

Btw, when creating this assets, what side of workflow you come from?
Primier or Final Cut?

 

The idea for this was the workflow that "bigger companies" tend to follow, in which animators will do the animation in some animation program (e.g. Maya), and then just drop them on the project to use "as is". So the idea was that the animations that you create in unity, would be handled by flux, because it would be an animation that you'll be adapting in the sequence itself (e.g. making the camera take 2 seconds to move instead of one).

However, I then noticed that a lot of ppl used it differently in Unity, with a lot of animations done inside Unity.

That being said, the next update - which will be Flux 2.0, for Unity 5, has a revamped animation workflow which I'm hoping ppl will prefer. In that version, you can simply toggle the event with "Control Animation" and then Flux controls it.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Hi,

I'm not following any specific program / tool. Initially I took a lot of hints from Modo's animation editor, and talked with animators that worked with me on my previous job. I found that video editing tools were a bit different from what I was looking for, probably the "closest thing" would be Matinee for Unreal, however I'm not following it. I'm trying to see what works best for Unity.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Hi laskroll,

Sorry for your frustrations. As for Flux crashing, I'd need a repro. So far I haven't heard people complaining about it crashing, but some times UT changes something with a Unity update which may break something.

If you have them there semi-transparent, they will be full color if you click alt. If you're not seeing that behaviour, let me know how to reproduce it pls.

Yes, documentation is lacking, specially when it comes to extending Flux. It is something I need to improve, but with the new update I've been working on a lot of stuff, and it will only be handled when I get to the end of it. If you have any particular cases that you'd want to see a better explanation on doing X, please let me know. Some times I forget that some people don't really have experience with programming.

What do you mean by point #4? You hit play, and then when you hit stop the sequence isn't showing on the editor window? Is it by any change loading a different scene? If so, then the editor would lose the reference.

BTW, when you have bugs or urgent questions, it is much faster if you just send me an email to support, then I notice it straight away.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

testing out flux to see if it meets our needs, and i've run into an issue. animation previewing isn't working for me as it seems to work in your "Flux - Animation Workflow" video. i've added the clips to the playanimation timeline and have toggled on the preview eye icon, but when i scrub or play in editmode the targeted model does not animate. no logs or errors, but the model just doesn't animate. note: these animations work fine in game.

we're on the 4.6 beta, so i'm wondering whether that might be the issue? have you tested on that release, or would i need your 2.0 version to use flux on 4.6 beta?

 

Hi,

Can you send me a test project to the support email? 4.6 worked fine with current Flux, however maybe some of the latest betas broke something.

As for Flux 2.0, it will be Unity 5 only, since there were a lot of changes, specially to the animation system.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

thank you for that nigh immediate response! turns out i was linking the wrong anim clips, and with the proper ones the preview functionality does work on 4.6 beta(20).

great work, and thanks again for the support.

 

First officially known project that is making use of Flux, and it looks awesome!

They also have a dev blog in which they mention Flux, yupi! ;-]
http://www.pokugame.com/devlog/releasing-the-teaser-trailer/

Can't wait to play it!

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Hi - we are currently evaluating the Flux trial to see if it meets our needs - I've hit a couple of issues and was wondernig if you can offer any advice:

1) I am getting really frequent crashes when working with animations on the timeline in 4.6 beta 20 (dropping in a new animation and moving it on the timeline, scrubbing etc - cant see a consistent repro method but it is happening very often - has taken me most of the afternoon to put together a simple scene with a character and camera animating). This is currently the biggest problem which is a real shame as there are a lot of positives, but perhaps these issues can be easily resolved...

2) There is an event to play a particle system and have this preview nicely when scrubbing the timeline, however when the event finishes the particles just freeze in their last position rather than continuing until they die (this is only an issue when scrubbing the timeline when the scene plays it works fine). It also seems that the play particles event stretches the time of the particles system - it would be nice if this was a toggle as currently to get the particles to play at the speed they were authored at involves a bit of trial and error.

3) Our cutscenes need to involve a player character that has been customised and the same scene might play with one of several different monsters - my plan was make our cutscenes with a generic 'stand in' characters and then swap in the real characters at run time. I have got a proof of concept of this working by searching through the sequence for the correct time line and setting its owner. However I do get some errors in the console (because I dont instantiate the unecessary 'stand in' characters:

MissingReferenceException: The variable _owner of FTimeline doesn't exist anymore.
You probably need to reassign the _owner variable of the 'FTimeline' script in the inspector.
UnityEngine.Component.GetComponent[Renderer] ()
FluxEditor.FRendererEventInspector.OnEnable ()
FluxEditor.FRendererColorEventInspector.OnEnable ()

I guess even though I set the owner immediately after instantiating the sequence that the error is happening before I do this.

Cheers!

Neil

 

Hi Neil,

First of all, thanks for giving it a try.

Can you confirm if this happens when you have a preview of the animation track (i.e. toggled the eye on), then changed the animation, and afterwards tried to scrub?

If so - and I hope not - it is something that Unity changed. In Unity 4.5 (and initial 4.6 betas) this worked fine, but in Unity 5 they changed something internally that when you change animation data after there is a preview saved in mecanim, it will crash internally in their code. I _hope_ that they didn't bring that change to 4.6, is that the behaviour you're noticing?

The problem with that is that at runtime you can tell Unity to stop emitting the particles and it will just let the ones already alive die out, but when you're previewing you can't do that because when the event ends, it stops running any code on it, and since Unity runtime isn't running you can't have that behaviour. I understand that it would be nice to have support for that, but I'd need to figure out a nice way of doing it, which unfortunately will not be at this time, maybe for Flux 2.x (which will be Unity 5 only).

Regarding the play speed, there's a fix, but maybe I didn't rebuild the trial with it... hmmm.. basically currently the Play Particle Event has a toggle called "normalizeToEventLength", and only if it is true it will change the speed of the particle system to match the event length. However, this means that if it is off, and you have a particle that takes 1 second to play, and you have an event that is 3 seconds, the last 2 seconds of the event aren't really doing anything so it may be misleading, but at least it will work as you'd want it.

I see the problem you're having. When using the sequence editor, it is trying to create inspectors but at that time it doesn't have the Transform, and in some cases I'm assuming that there is and try to do certain things (e.g. if it is an animation track and the object doesn't have an Animator attached to it, I add it).

However, this does show a problem, I'm going to have to treat these differently in the editor. Although, at this point, I'm planning to add it to 2.0.

That being said, as a workaround, please try this:
- Spawn your character, name him what it was named when you originally created the Sequence
- Instantiate the Sequence (since Unity doesn't have like "global references", it will try to fetch stuff by name, so if the name matches, it will get it).

Let me know if that helped you at least continuing moving forward with that trial version.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Heya Nuno - based on the info re. point 1 I think I have a good way to reproduce the crash:

a) Add an animation track (set up the controller and add an animation)
b) Turn on preview
c) Scrub - everything is ok
d) Drop a second animation onto the track
e) Scrub - crash

If I toggle off the preview before I add the second animation then toggle it back on then the crash does not occur so it does sound to me like what you describe. I can at least use this as a workaround for now but it would be great to get a proper fix - unfortunately we do not plan to switch to unity 5 for the initial release of this game as the timelines are too tight so it would be good to know if this is not going to make it until unity 5.0 / Flux 2.0.

The normalizeToEventLength toggle does not seem to be available in trial version currently - I wonder if having this would solve both my issues since if I have a particle effect that lasts 1 second and then takes 2 seconds to fully die I could have an event 3 seconds long which is set to normaliseToEventLength and this will keep the particle system updating. Would be great to try (this is a particular problem with impact/explosion type effects since there is a big 'bang' at the start but this needs to dissipate so that you can see what is happening in the rest of the scene)

I will try your suggestion for point 3 and let you know how I get on.

Thanks for the response - really appreciate it.

Neil

 

Damn.... It is the Unity 5 change. Basically if you try to change a preview but the controller / animations have changed, it now crashes internally in Unity when you play it without rebuilding. Previously it would just show the cached preview, and then you'd have to manually rebuild it (toggle off and on).

I'm going to have to find a solution for the 4.x version, I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, while you're using the current version, please keep doing that workaround (i.e. toggle preview off before changing the events).

Maybe it didn't make it to the trial or even the version, I know that I did do it because someone had the same problem, maybe it was just a tweak done for that guy.

Nevertheless, since I'm going to have to push a fix to Flux 1.x, I'll add that new event. And yes, if the particle system doesn't loop and you set the duration of it to half the event, the second half you'll just see the particles move away (they will disappear if their life end before the end of the event).

Whenever I push the trial version (will always be faster than the actual release because UT needs to approve), I'll let you know.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Pushed Flux v1.2.4 to the Asset Store, hopefully it fixes the crash issues (at least Neil and I can't reproduce them anymore).

It also has the new play particle event that people asked for. If you're evaluating it with the trial version, you can already download trial 1.2.4 from here.

EDIT: I heard that in the latest 4.5 it was also an issue, but that this build will also fix it for that version.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso
http://www.fluxeditor.com

 

Nuno,

Im using the trial version of your editor. Nice product. Im going to go ahead and purchase it. I had one question though ... do I have to redo all the animation work I did in the trial version ? Or after purchase I can just update a license and the watermark will go away ?