Diminishing Sine Wave for Animation

okay, i found out how to use a sine wave editor on an fcurve to modify ONE attribute of ONE bone in my scene, using a sine wave in additive mode to make a diminishing sine wave. (i’m working with a dolphin, so think bobbing up to the surface of the water.)

now what i want to do… is take a section of my animation where my dolphin is wiggling into position. and instead of just easing from the last ‘wiggle’ frame into the static ‘sit’ animation, i want to make it settle into the final position with a diminishing back and forth motion. --without having to manually keyframe every loving bone for every single move :X

so i have the tail waving side to side, and the fluke settling down, and the chest moving aside, the flippers settling down, and i want ALL THAT motion to be mapped to a diminishing sine wave.

um… HELP!

i tried selecting all the bones i wanted on the sine wave, opening the fcurve editor, grabbing the start and end keyframes, and sticking a sine wave on it. but that only stuck the sine wave on one curve. then i saw a tutorial that said to copy the modifier and paste it to all the curves. but when i did that, it just added a second sinewave to the curve that had a sine wave. (oh wait… they must have meant one at a time…)

if you don’t get what i’m trying to do, imagine this… a bouncing ball, right? it drops, it hits the ground, it bounces back up. for each successive bounce, it bounces less and less high, until finally it settles on the ground. so, from ‘on the ground’ keyframe to ‘up in the air’ keyframe, it has a diminishing sine wave.

all well and good. now imagine i have several bouncing balls, bouncing in different directions, and i want to apply the diminishing sine wave to all of them.

maybe there’s a tutorial? this kind of action is rather common, i think.

thanks, guys!

I am not sure how common a scenario this is, but as I could find no workable solution to the issue when I needed one, I created my own Animation Node that does exactly that:


The help page for this sub-set of my nodes for Maths Functions/Generators is here, The Bounce Node is about half way down. You will need Blender 2.79 and Animation Nodes 2.0 then add either just this node, or the whole lot, full instructions on my website in obvious places, nodes are on my GitHub. To use other than vertically, I animate an Empty with it then use that to transform other meshes - you should look at Animation Nodes…

Cheers, Clock. :wink:

Example uses on this video. - you will see balls bouncing at various rates.

That’s pretty cool, clockmender (if I may jump in and say so). Looks like once I’m finished with CG Cookie’s Animation Flow, I’ve got some studying to do in AN.