I am using armatures to animate a machine, I have noticed it doing something which I would like to correct. For instance, I want to rotate a boom clockwise, so I go to that frame, rotate the boom, save the locRotSize. But if I use the arrow keys to go through the frames, I notice that the boom first starts to rotate counter-clockwise just before it starts rotating clockwise. Why does it do this? And more importantly, how do I correct it?
TIA!
When you use Keyframes Blender automatically generates a IPO curve smoothly joining the keyframes to calculate the intermediate position.
Keyword here is ‘smoothing’
The IPO is a spline passing through your points, and, to do be smooth, it often do ‘overshoots’ (i.e. going in the opposite direction for a little while).
2 solutions:
1 - Key frame every frame :o (straight & silly)
2 - Go to the IPO window, select the IPO you are generating, go to EditMode and edit it as you would for a Bezier curve to prevent overshoots.
(this implies you know how IPO works…)
Stefano
That was what I was after!!
Thanks Stefano!
I believe you could also go to the action’s IPO window and change the curve type. In edit mode select the vertices in the time line you prefer not to have the ‘ease/overshoot’ in and hit ‘h’ then ‘v’ and you’ll get a direct line between locations and/or rotations.
I used this a ton on my last (and first professional) job.
Shortcut for toggling IPO curve types
T Key in IPO window
In the IPO window, select curve, Press T Key to get Constant/Linear/Bezier menu
You do professional animations with blender?? I thought blender was strickly amateur or semi-pro. I thought all the professional animators and 3D artist used 3d studio or photoshope or Maya???
I didn’t see the last reply on this topic until today.
The first job was a one minute secton of a 30 minute video done for a local pile driver’s union. My part was animating a story the producer had thought of, i.e. depicting a Laurel & Hardy style team driving piles in prehistoric times, then in Roman times, then sacraficing a virgin to the Roman river god. It turned out pretty well. The union folks and the producer liked it. By today’s standards, pretty simple. I did many things the hard way, as I had been using Blender for only a few months at the time.
I’ve since done just a couple of other professonal jobs, but continue to work on my own animation projects. . . by “professonal” I mean jobs that paid a few hundred dollars. My first actually paid for my new computer at the time, which was fortunate since I needed it to do the job!
blender is quite good, and there’s no reason to not use it in a professional capacity, other than, as you mentioned, most use maya or 3dsMax. some day i think we will see it being used more widely in this capacity. i suppose there are things that maya does better, but not much. and blender doesn’t cost 7000 dollars or whatever they are asking for maya these days.
To understand, and solve, this problem, select the object and look at an IPO-window. (e.g. select the Animation screen) Choose the animation IPOs.
Here you will see at least three separate curves, one for each “Loc_” type. There will be a discrete point on each curve for each keyframe that you have set. The horizontal axis is time (frame-number); the vertical is the value of that particular parameter.
Observe that each curve passes exactly through each point, and that all of the intermediate values are interpolated. This curve is an ordinary Bezier(?) curve. For ordinary, “organic” motion, this will give you a very realistic type of motion. But, not for a machine.
For a machine, you want linear interpolation between the various points. Simply select each curve and change the interpolation-type to Linear. You will now observe that the curve changes, with a straight line connecting the various discrete points on the curve.
It really should “go without saying” that Blender is obviously a professional-grade tool for video work. If you wanted to do an entire project in Blender you can do that; I have done so now many times.
Obviously, “time is money.” Therefore, if there is a particular, identifiable reason to use a product like Maya, sufficient to pay its license-costs, learning curve and so-on, then by all means, do it! If the shop you are doing work for has agreed-upon Maya as a standard, for example, then don’t buck the flow. (Not only use the tool they’re using, but use the version that they’re using!)
If you have no such constraints upon the project, and you’re wondering “can Blender do the job?” The answer, almost certainly, is an unequivocable yes. As with any tool, you should plan out the entire project and make sure that you will not only avoid any dead-ends but also do the job as effectively as you can (the time you save equals profits!!), but the odds are extremely good that “Blender dood it!”