Animation speed

Artwork Animations
1

This is kind of hard to explain, but i’ll try.

Say for example I have an animation of a piston and cylinder with keyframes on frame 1, 15, and 30. Frame one is the piston withdrawn from the cylinder, frame 15 the piston is inside the cylinder, and frame 30 it’s back out creating a looped animation between frames 1-30.
However, when blender automatically calculates the frames between the keyframes, the frames are uneven. As the piston moves forward during the first 7-8 frames it travels further than in the next 7-8 frames, causing it to appear as if the piston is slowing down gradually as it enters the cylinder.
My question is, can I control how blender calculates the new frames to even them out, and make the piston move at a constant speed throughout the animation?

Thanks, and sorry that’s the best I can explain =P

2

Yes you can. Blender is defaulting to an ‘ease in’ ‘ease out’ f-curve, and you want a linear curve instead. Open a Graph Editor, select the curvy f-curves and change them to linear using the hot key ‘t’ or use the menu Key>>Interpolation Mode>>Linear

3

Ah! Just what I was looking for. Many thanks <3