I need to animate a bone’s movement along Z axis, as if I would apply noise to it’s IPO curve. How do I do that? (if it’s doable)
Basically I need for the bone to move between Z=-0.3 to Z=0.3 randomly. And I need that to be looped between 30 frames of animation.
Thanks.
This is not too hard to do, learning how to do it is the hard part. First, read this link:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Reference/Windows/Ipo#R
It’s how to record mouse movements to IPO curves, it’s old, but everything is still the same, except the hotkey for 2.49 is CTRL-R (can be found in the curve menu). Please note, you have to hold down CTRL while recording, to stop - SPACE, ENTER, or LMB, not ESC!
So you switch the IPO editor to pose, select the bone you want to move, insert a loc key. The IPO editor records the bone’s axis, not the world axis, so figure out which bone axis you want to animate. Select that curve via LMB in the IPO editor and record your mouse movements. Once done recording, it produces a curve for you. Then you can edit the curve as needed - scaling to get into the range you want, removing keyframes if the curve is too long time wise, etc.
I’ve attached a file took me 5 mins to make. I recorded to the bone’s z-axis, which is really the world’s y-axis. In 2.5x it’s a bit easier, you can just select the curve and add a noise modifier to it.
Randy
Attachments
RecordIPO.blend (131 KB)
Thanks man, I will give it a shot. I will try doing that in 2.5.x, but I am not too proficient with it’s GUI yet.
In 2.5x you can add modifiers, including ‘noise’, to animation curves. In the F-curve editor select a curve and press N to open the properties panel. From the Add Modifier option choose Noise. These are just like the object modifiers, in that you can control parameters of the modifier and turn it on and off as needed. On the other hand they seem like a work in progress and their function may change in future.
I was looking at the f-curve modifiers in 2.5, and indeed the noise would do what you want. But, I don’t see a way to turn it off after x-amount of frames.
Randy
For that you could add an Envelope modifier below the Noise modifier. It is a bit fiddly but should work.