Keyframing interpolation problem

Support Animation and Rigging
1

We have encountered a problem with the keyframing interpolation in Blender. Here is the situation:

In any other program (including 3DS MAX!) when you animate an object, for example a simple cube, the interpolation between it’s keyframes are flat splines. Here is a very simple and basic example:

make a cube
at frame 1 set a keyframe for it’s location
at frame 20 set another keyframe for it’s locations without moving it (so that there is a pause from frame 1 to 20)
at frame 30 move the cube at set a keyframe at this new location

If you look at the animation the cube moves between frame 1 and 20 in anticipation of the movement from 20 to 30. This is the default.
I (and many other animators) are used to having flat bezier splines so that when you copy a keyframe from one frame to another you have a pause. You don’t want the object (or character shape) to move.
In Blender, in the IPO Curve Editor, I have only found the following interpolation Modes : Constant, Linear, Bezier.
Bezier is the one an animator needs however with flat tangents between keyframes with the same value and ease-in and ease-out between keyframes with different values.

Please see the various attachments (the other program is 3DS MAX).
I also know that you can break the tangents in the IPO Curve Editor and manually do what I am asking for each and every keyframe. However if you want to animate a character with it’s many many controls this is not possible.
There has to be some way to either set the tangents to bezier flat as default or to apply this to all the keyframes at one time.

This is what an animator needs:
http://www.hackyourlife.com/tmp/2.jpg

This is what blender does:
http://www.hackyourlife.com/tmp/blender_bezier.jpg

The following animations demonstrate what is good and what blender does.

This is good:
http://www.hackyourlife.com/tmp/1.avi

This is what blender does (bad):
http://www.hackyourlife.com/tmp/blender_bezier.avi

Thanks for reading and posting your comments and solutions.

Igor

2

if you want flat curves, just select your curve, hit ‘T’ and choose ‘linear’ from the popup menu. other than that, you can edit your curves by going into edit mode with the tab key, and adjusting the handles.

3

I also have this problem. Can’t I change the default to linear somehow? Or massively change a lot of different objects curves to linear?

Even then, I’d miss the ease-in, ease-out that I want.

The problem is that if I have five objects moving in one direction, one of them looks off since it’s recently been moving in another direction (as it’s previous IPO curve’s tangent interferes with it’s new movement).

Still is still still!

4

What version of Blender are you using? The default on mine (2.41+) is auto-clamped beziers which are flattened - the cube doesn’t move until after the middle key. If you’re using 2.4+ you can select your curve(s) and toggle auto-clamp with Alt-H (or via the curve menu)

Linear curves are not the same since they aren’t curved at all. Linear keys won’t give you any ease-in or ease-out which would be pretty crappy for an organic model.

To switch curve types, Select the curve(s) and hit T-KEY and choose:
Constant: Flat/horizontal between keys (AKA “Stepped Keys”)
Linear: No curving. No acceleration/deceleration (ease-in/out)
Bezier: True curves with various handle-types available (aligned, free, vector, clamped)

5

Cool thanks for these short cuts AndyD but what i really want to know is can you set blender so all keys are created on constant to be converted later to Bezier ?? so animation can be done like the keith lango style for maya:

http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/popThru.html

What i want to do is create all keys to automatically be Constant/stepped is there any way of doing this ??

Cheers :slight_smile:

6

Soz my bad figured it out :slight_smile: