When you record an animation from manual movement, it’s easy to get hundreds of unnecessary keyframes and jagged movement.
Is there a conventional process by which professionals can efficiently clean up a recorded animation with this problem?
Also, is there a way to record x, y and z movements independently?
for your first question, you delete them or reposition them. When I did some mocap work and mocap work at school, the standard practice is, look for a problem or a glitch and just delete it. Maybe you then blend it with another movement or you hand animate that portion to get it looking right again but in general if its a bad key its a bad key.
For your second question, once your primary keys are in place you can key individual transforms for your secondaries by pressing N and keying the specific transform type. This is not as smooth as maya though. It will still key the X, Y, and Z, but it will keep your transforms in the state of the key they are in so if you don’t want x and y to change then they will be where they were going to be anyway. What upsets me about this is, if you need to change when that key happens, lets say your key is supposed to only effect the X axis, maybe a few frames earlier or later, then you screwed up your timing for the Y and Z axis. AFAIK you can mute or delete axis keys in the graph or dope sheet but thats till a LOT of work that is unneeded and I think any animator who is used to industry standard pipelines would agree.
But you’re talking about hundreds or even thousands of “glitches.” Even if you delete one keyframe, you’d also have to delete dozens surrounding it.
are you motion tracking? you say record animation from manual input. I remember I used to sit in opti or X and I would spend a few days on a couple moments of tracking just deleting frames, re-fonfiguring orientations, fixing curves afterwords, the works. Yeah mocap has come a long way since then but it’s not an expensive endeavor for no reason, or even because cameras and software is expensive. Studios get paid anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to the hundreds depending on the job because of this. So, yeah, the dozens surrounding it too. I am curious how you are doing Motion Capture in blender because in my experience it is nowhere near the level I worked at. Blender still has trouble keying a single axis. Much respect to all the people who work so hard on the films. I mean, they are cool. I just cant help but think of how much cooler some of the work would be given how skilled they clearly are if blender offered more industry standard solutions to things. Maya, C4D, X, Opti, they are all buggy, but when I need to do something I can. I don’t have to find work arounds, and if I need something to work, it does. Sure I risk a crash from time to time but I save regularly and the rest falls into place. Over all, there is a lot of work that goes into these and the workflow keeps me productive. Blender is still lacking in that regard quite heavily.
If you are taking about camera tracking then if you have bad frames then try moving your sample areas mid recording to somewhere more stable. Maybe you see a glitch at frame 750, move the sample area at 751 to somewhere more stable so it can continue tracking at a low error.
No, I’m hitting the record button and moving the mouse.
ahhh, that’s autokeying. That’s sorta what auto key is. Even maya’s is terrible but better than blenders. There are actual animations softwares, typically proprietary that do a much better job. Autokeying in my experience, in blender is best for just primary keys. In maya you have a bit more leeway but still not great. Autokeying is so you can quickly lay down an idea but yeah, you still are usually clearing a lot of frames or at least the keys on specific axis and tweaking them.
Right and I’m pretty certain I saw a way to clean this up a long time ago, but I don’t remember the steps at this point. There is some kind of special minimal path interpolation that blender is capable of.
I mean, it’s going to depend on the problem you’re having. Are you having rotational problems or problems with easing? You are saying that it is jittery, but, is that a problem because of too many frames, or a problem because of some thing else. Euler filter is your friend in the graph but that will only solve so many problems and won’t fix issues unrelated to 360+degree rotations or glitches so it can be hard to say. Even basic animation is a skill worth 10k hours of its own.
I’m confused as to why you’re here, I’m not disputing that animation takes time. I’m certain blender has tools to assist in this process, I doubt it would be that unprofessional.
It has the same tools as any other program. It’s just that the auto-key system is a commonly complained about issue. Many industry professionals have spoken out about it. I am here because I answered your initial question. It turned out you meant something else and that is fine but if you are going to dispute me on it still, my suggestion is go see for yourself. Go learn other industry standard applications like maya or modo and tell me, does blender work as well? They all suck but you would agree blender is more of a pain with auto keying. I love blender. I learned on blender. But the simple fact that everyone faces right now is blender is just now getting to the cusp of industry standardization, and a large part of that is in part to paid add ons like asset manager, for instance, which bring some functionality of more industry standard applications to blender. Blender, yes, can do almost anything maya or modo can do, but that doesn’t mean it’s not always more difficult to do it. And, I mean, hey, blender makes certain things easier too, sure, but you say you want tools to assist you. I am saying, Auto key is sketchy in all the off the shelf modeling applications I can think of. I called maya out too on that. I said it wasn’t great either. Just better than blender. Auto-key is very frequently avoided for secondary frames or inbetweens. They are a good way to quickly block out your primarys and then move on. That’s not unprofessional. Thats just the reality of applications not dedicated solely to animating.
Any way. I offered my help as someone doing this for the last 15 years. You meant something else. I responded with an answer, whether it was one you wanted to hear or not, instead of just abandoning the conversation. Maybe someone else will have some method of doing this that I don’t know. That’s totally possible. But theres a lot that goes into “cleaning up” your frames. For instance. You didn’t answer my question as to why you feel your frames have jagged movements and you didn’t post a blend file for us to look at and help you. Right now you are telling us half the story instead of answering my questions which would allow me to give you more constructive results.
Go to addon preference and search for simplify curve.
I’m still confused as to why you’re wasting people’s time here. I never disputed that other software can do things that blender does better and I’ve advocated exactly that in the appropriate discussions. I asked a blender question to learn something about blender.
Yes that’s what this video also said.
You asked about blender, not its thousands of add ons, and didn’t elaborate when I asked you to. I am glad someone came up with the answer you were looking for and that it all worked out. Many of us will not know what you are trying to achieve if you avoid our questions just to say we are wasting your time. We are trying to help and given the ambiguity of “jittery” which could be the euler effect, misplaced keys, any number of things. Like I said, I am very glad @skuax had the answer you were looking for. It is far more useful to all of us who may know how to help you when you offer the information we are looking for instead of biting at us because you don’t like an ambiguous answer to an ambiguous question. If you are in a position where you can’t always offer more info like I sometimes am, say so, many of us have clients and we cannot share everything we are doing. Sometimes we have creative ways of how you can get the point across more clearly without sharing the project with us.
You ranted about maya.
The fact that there are thousands is why people often ask questions.
I stated in the original question that it was jagged and you also confirmed that being jittery is one of autokeying’s traits. That shouldn’t require explanation if you have “15 years” of experience.
It actually does, because it could have been an euler filtering problem or any number of other issues, which I also said, but I asked you to elaborate on it and instead you asked why I was even here. My rant was to say that blenders auto-keying isn’t at the level of other applications which already aren’t great, and they ARE industry standard. It doesn’t matter now. You got your answer and I am happy you did. It was good advice and I am glad they understood your problem. From my experience, having done this for so long, Saying it is “jittery” doesn’t tell me much because I know a LOT of things that could make it jittery. Idealy I would have liked to have seen a screen shot of your graph at least. Just say, this is what it looks like, do you know what this could be. “Jagged,” doesn’t say a whole lot.
You literally said
which means you know it doesn’t require an explanation because it’s a common problem. I also know it’s a common issue which is why your question isn’t particularly relevant. I stated specifically
which means I’m looking for something specific, which for seemingly no reason, you ignored.
Yes and a common fix could be to apply, an Euler filter, if the problem was filtering, but you didn’t show anything, or it could have been a problem with the translations because something wasn’t frozen, and I would have told you apply your transforms but I then said
Because given that you didn’t provide us with more information, that could have given me insight into your problem, and I could have told you, oh, its not a transform issue or an euler effect issue, there is a plugin for that, here you go, but instead you overlooked the question and took it as an attack. That’s fine. Like I said, I really am happy you got your answer. Again, thank you @skuax. I am glad you understood the problem @cheesemongoose9 was having.
Except I said explicitly
not when there’s discontinuities, not when there’s a lock, which means I’m referring to commonly seen jaggedness of autokeying, which you yourself acknowledged.
I acknowledged the symptoms and the cause but not ailment because that is smething I couldn’t possibly know without more information which is why I asked.
Calm down guys. Let’s keep this place out of bad mood.
Yes that’s true . You ve done your best for helping. And as an animator (often) i think that you did it right. But it’s really hard to understood what is behind the question.
Mainly people want a magic button. That’s there rights. Perhaps one day they ll take the time to read . But for now , everybody needs video without nothing else.
As a teacher also. It’s not my way of teaching. But it’s like this.
Thanks for sharing. Nothing in return is the key.