There’s probably a really easy way to do this that I haven’t been able to figure out, but is there any way to animate something without IPO curves? Like do something to an object, go to the next frame, do something again, etc. I guess you could key every frame, but is there a way to avoid IPOs completely?
I suppose that if you don t use ipo you can animate . you can go from one frame to another and you key what you want( you don t need to key all the frame). but for some things you need ipo. exemple I m currently trying the particles, and i use a fiedls, i did try to key the force of the field. but it take only one key, and once it s key you can t change the value. so i put an other key somwhere else. then i go into ipo so as to edit it manualy. i suppose i t s maybe a bug. but ipo are really usefull and each animation package got that. it s a very powerfull tool to refine animation.
It’s completely possible to keyframe movement without paying the slightest attention to the IPO curves (they’ll still be there but you can just ignore them), but why would you want to? They provide in-depth control over all aspects of the motion or effect being animated.
IPO curves are just simple graphs of change over time, not rocket science. Learn to read and use them properly and they can unlock a much wider world of artistic expression, despite their looking like something out of a high school algebra student’s nightmare 
Sure. Render your object. Move it slightly. Render it again, but increment the save as file name by one (press the plus key). Move it slightly again. Render and save again. Repeat until you’ve taken all the individual frames in your animation. Then bring them into the sequence editor, make each image last one frame, jam them up side by side, and create an animation from the sequence of still renders.
It’s just like making a flip book on a pad of paper, except you get to use an expensive piece of hardware and some awfully sophisticated software to do it. The question is: why would you want to? IPOs are your InterPOlation curves. They are the gizmos that let you set up key frames and have Blender draw all the in-betweens.
If you set two key frames, Blender is gonna make IPO curves: it has to. That’s how it knows where the object is when it’s in between the two key frames. Now, do you have to LOOK at those IPO curves? No, not if you don’t want to. No more than you have to look at the outliner view and see how Blender is associating all your objects and meshes and materials and so on.
But…(you knew this was coming, right?) if you want to make any changes to that key frame animation, smooth out the moves, ease in or ease out of a pose, have something pause while something else moves… in other words, turn an unsophisticated moving object into something that looks like its alive, why, then IPO curves are the simplest way to go about it.
So, my advice is rather than look for ways to avoid working with IPO curves, learn how they work and how to use them. It’ll be time well spent.
Open the “User Preferences”, change to the “Edit Methods” section. Turn on “Auto keyframe”.
What exactly are you trying to do?
IPO curves are just a graphical way of manipulating the animation data in the scene. They are usually used AFTER you’ve roughly input your animation.
Most of the time, when animating something, you’ll just directly move/rotate/scale … whatever your object(s), then either use the “I” key, or you can turn on “autokey” either through the preferences or by clicking the red “record” button in the Timeline window.
Mike
Orinoco touched on what I’m going for–I’m trying to get a flip-book -type jerky look. So I’m purposely wanting to make an animation jagged, not smooth. I’m thinking maybe the best way to do it would be to make an animation go by twice as fast as I want, render all the frames, and then just stretch the frames out to cover twice as much time. I was hoping there would be some way to select, say, frame 1, pose the model, go over to frame, say, 3, pose the model again, etc. without having IPO curves modify the model for frame 2…
You do this by setting your IPO curves to “constant” interpolation. Select an IPO curve (or all with A-key), then Tkey->Constant. This effectively turns off interpolation, causing the animation to hold until the next keyframed pose.
So, my advice is rather than look for ways to avoid working with IPO curves, learn how they work and how to use them. It’ll be time well spent.
What Orinoco said.
Sweet, it works. Thanks a lot:yes:.
See, IPO curves are what you wanted all the time ! Just not “curvy” curves.
There’s lots of other variations to the smooth Bezier-type curve as well. You might try playing with the various kinds of Point>Handle Types there are, for such pleasantries as sawtooth curves, triangle curves, attack/decay modulations (borrowed from musical terminology), all kinds of other-than-out-of-the-IPO-box curve shapes. Such manipulations are what make the idea of controlling in-betweening with math so powerful. Of course you can still do a frame-by-frame, move-and-render, if you want. Look what it did for Ray Harryhausen ;).
BTE, that “jerky” look you’re wanting often used to be called “pixilation” (from “pixies”, not “pixels”) when done with film, particularly when applied to people in motion. Used effective failry recently in Stir of Echoes and [i]The Ring[/i[ for a supernatural effect.
I had to look up who Ray Harryhausen is :o. I’m trying to do something like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFtiM9SttGc in blender (but probably on a smaller scale).
Well, that short you linked to isn’t really pixilation, its just rather funky (perhaps intentionally) stop-motion puppet animation, what Harryhausen did with flair and finesse in his better moments. If you like this kind of look, you should study up in the history of stop-motion techniques, there are a great many masters from the past that you can learn from.
I’ll see if I can find a real pixilation example (with peeps rather than Legos on 'roids 
)
Oh, that. I’ve seen pixilation called “human stop motion” in a few places. I guess it goes by both. Good to know.
(“Legos on 'roids” … well put)
Actually, I’ve thought for a while that a stop motion simulation would be a cool script. You would want a little more than just unsmoothed ipos to do it right. You’d also want very slight random variation in light, etc from frame to frame. I think this wouldn’t be too hard to do with a Python script, although it might be a bit challenging to do it in a non-destructive way (that is, a way that can be turned off to leave you with the original animation, so you can continue to edit it without working with a million keyframes).
the second before reading the thread i decided that this would be the last one to read, then i would post a new one. And voila! i was saved. was the T-key i was looking for. thanks =D
I think this is possible through Python
This will be some thing like this
if curr_frame=100 then ob.LocX=2.10
if cur_frame=102 then ob.LocX=2.5
I hope so, but I have not tried.