motion arcs, speed/location separation, onion skin and ease in/out of keys, where?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello,

I’ve only now delved into 3d animation in Blender and I find parts of it very unpolished.

I can only get ghosting to show bones, not the deformed mesh, and there doesn’t seem to be visible/editable motion paths for bone motion. Where can I find those? Lack of arcs lends to jerky, robotic character motion. Current workaround is apparently to animate almost every single frame, making keyframes quite useless.

Also, it seems Blender does not separate between speed and location. Having a separation between these two allows location to be animated separately from the speed something arrives/leaves from that location. It’s quite a time saver.

Is there a way to quickly set ease in, ease out types of interpolation for keyframes in dope sheet (similar to AE). This makes production work quite a lot faster, as not everything needs full curve treatment, especially as every curve is edited separately even though it’s part of the same keyframe. It could be good to have key supergroups, so that editing all rotation/motion curves would happen with one adjustment. Now it’s three times the work it needs to be.

Has someone made scripts to patch these shortcomings or is it in some GSOC project?

2

Also, is there currently some way to scale armature and have the animation scale in the same proportion (kind of like retargeting). For scaling it’s not that important as armature and model objects can be scaled and animations will work properly (except maybe for realtime use, if extra root nodes are not wanted and if root node needs to be at scale 1.

Is it currently possible to retarget animation for another skeleton of different proportions? I wonder how people usually go about this, as it’s quite common for game graphics.