I’m working on a project in which I’m attempting to mimic traditional animation using 3D. I’d like to be able to animate on 2s and 3s, but that doesn’t look particularly easy to do in Blender.
My thought is that it might be possible to accomplish this by creating a new keyframe interpolation based on ‘Constant’ that stair steps every two or three frames.
Has anyone managed animating on twos and threes in Blender? Is it worth looking into how to create new keyframe interpolations or am I barking up the wrong tree?
EDIT: Hmmm… I see stepped interpolation is a modifier in the graph editor. This looks like it might actually be what I’m looking for. It didn’t occur to me to look there until just now… naturally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehKPdreb_X8 Here is a test I did awhile back to see if I could create stepped animation in Blender. The way I did it was pretty simple, I just animated it normally, then went through the animation and set a ‘whole character’ keyframe for every bone on every other frame, and every single frame if it was an especially fast motion (just like how it’s done in stopmotion and actual 2D). After that, I went through and deleted any keyframes between the “whole character” keyframes I had set. Then, after that, I set the interpolation of the bones to constant. Theres probably an easier way to do it, but that’s the way that worked for me.
@NoahTheAnimator That would certainly work, but that’s going to be very time consuming.
@tntcheats I could change the frame rate uniformly across the entire animation, but I would like to be able to vary it based on the speed of individual elements in the animation. The modifier in the graph editor looks like does what I want, but I haven’t had a chance to actually test it yet.
Noah’s method is labor-intensive, but it’s totally scriptable.
Would be better just to render parts animated on different counts separately, because then you don’t have to waste half or two-thirds of your rendering time.
I don’t know if in hand-drawn animation you’d be animating seperate elements at different counts in the same frame-- like character is one twos, but the background is sliding across on ones. If you want a lake sliding across the background on ones but accurately reflecting a character animated on twos, something complicated like that, I don’t see that you can do it except via Noah’s method or something similar. But if it’s all simple enough, basically purely camera ray stuff, you could do it in VSE with separate renders-- best entirely separate, to save rendering time, but if you want to do it with render layers, doable.
