Inserting frames into an animation

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Here’s my deal: I have a fairly involved 2100-frame animation, with several objects that have several IPOs (material, location, rotaiton, camera focal length, etc.). All of these IPOs have the objects do different things at different times. There really are a number of “stages” to the animation.

(If you’re interested, it’s the “celestial sphere” video which you can find at http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/a102/handouts/)

Now, suppose I want to add some additional motion in the middle of the existing animations. What I’d like to do, really, is grab all of the points on all of the IPOs for every object and (say) move them 500 frames to the right. Now, yes, I know I could do this by editing all the various types of all the IPOs for each object one at a time, and moving them over, but that sounds both like a rather long process as well as fraught with error (it’s really easy to miss one). What I just want to do is tell belnder to "take every IPO control point at frame 300 or higher and add 500 frames to it).

Is there any easy way to do this without doing it one-by-one for every object and IPO type?

Thanks,

-Rob

2

Try using the NLA editor to grab keys and move them. I’ve had to do similar tasks but with scaling the motion over time.

3

The NLA editor is new to me; is there a decent tutorial/introduction to it?

(Does “NLA” stand for “Non-linear Animation”? I don’t even know that, I’m that clueless about it.)

-Rob

4

(If you’re interested, it’s the “celestial sphere” video which you can find at http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/a102/handouts/)

Had a look at the page (might want to spell-proof it! :slight_smile: ) and animations.

Inserting animation:

If its a new SECTION you want to add, the easiest way is NOT to add frames in the middle! :smiley:

In “normal” videos with cuts from one to the next, you could render each clip separately, then join them in either Blender’s sequencer or use another “video editor” program to concatenate the various clips.

You might be able to do that, but I see from the animation it would be tricky since everything continuously flows from one point to the next. Since you’ve got such a flow going, I’m guessing the new section you want to add will not leave the viewpoint in the exact same position as when it started. So…

nla - Yes, that is Non-linear Animation, and probably the biggest change in Blender animation, bigger than armatures even. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of documentation on it, and its definitely more complex in practice, but I think it will make things easier. I hope someone will do a really good tutorial on how to use it effectively some day.

The documentation project page is at:
http://download.blender.org/documentation/html/x4954.html

Pick the NLA Editor off of the window type chooser menu thingie, or CTRL+SHIFT+F12 and you should see all your IPOs. Hit HOME of course to see as much as possible, although you can’t do a vertical resize.

You should be able to right-click select the IPO name(s) (or something like that), or else do a box-select on (what I think are key frame) blocks on the right side of the window. You can of course select as many IPO blocks as you want, then SLIDE them all over at once. :slight_smile:
I don’t think you’ll need any action blocks, luckily.

WARNING! There were some NLA bugs in the past. So make sure you’ve got everything backed up before you start working on it. Doing a search on NLA and crash should find it. Something about not leaving the NLA window visible when saving I think.

animations comments: Excellent job!

The moonphase startled me with the zoom! :smiley:
Wasn’t sure what the big pink disk was for on the earthorbitsun clip, but after seeing the celestial sphere animation, I’m guessing that its to show the ecliptic and why there’s parallax?
The c.s. animation was beautifully done. Thanks for sharing!

5

animations comments: Excellent job!

The moonphase startled me with the zoom! :smiley:
Wasn’t sure what the big pink disk was for on the earthorbitsun clip, but after seeing the celestial sphere animation, I’m guessing that its to show the ecliptic and why there’s parallax?
The c.s. animation was beautifully done. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks!

The first zoom on the moonphase is too fast and rough. I made the celestial sphere animation last year over the course of a couple of weekends before the class started. On the day I was going to talk about the phases of the moon, I woke up at 5AM and decided that I should do an animation for that as well. Since the class was at 10AM and I still had to eat breakfast, commute in, prepare some other lecture notes, etc., I didn’t have a whole lot of time… The later zooms on the moon phase video work better than the first one, but since I was rushed to get it done (and I had already added other frames later making it a pain to expand the number of frames used in the first zoom), I never went back to fix that first one.

One thing about all of these animations: when I use them in class, I pause them at various spots and talk about them. With the moon phases, I only wanted long enough at various “pause” spots for me to be able to hit the pause key on my player so that I could talk baout it. That’s why it rushes by so fast.

In “earth orbiting sun”, the pink disk is the equator of the Earth. The point of that is to show how the Sun is sometimes above, sometimes below the Celestial equator at different times of the year, thanks to the 23.5 degree tilt of the Earth’s axis relative to the plane of Earth’s orbit about the Sun. That animation was also put together quickly-- about 2.5 hours one afternoon, a good fration of which was my trying to figure out how to get path animation to do what I want. (There were no actual paths in any of the earlier animations, just things rotating, so I hadn’t yet figured out how to do paths right.)

I’ve got one more on there now which I slammed together the other morning in about 1.5 hours, although I did pull objects from the celestial sphere animation. This one shows how the moon appears to move in the sky from one day to the next.

-Rob

6

here’s one suggestion. not sure if this is what you are looking for, but,…

  1. save your whole scene to a new file, so if this doesn’t work you’ll still have the original
  2. before you hit animate, 2 things. First, in the display buttons, change the frames to only the ones you want to change.
  3. Now in the animation buttons, see the ones that say ‘map old’ ‘map new’? By setting map new higher, you will extend the relative length of it.

Then, you can take the original scene, split it in the sequence editor, and splice in the newly altered portion.

Of course you can also add extra objects, or whatever into your animation while reshooting that bit. Hope it works.