Problem pasting keyframes with spline animation (using hooks)

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m trying to animate a swimming cycle for a whale using spline IK for the head and tail, but when I try to copy and paste the keyframes from the start to the finish so that the animation loops, the hooks for spline IK revert their position to origin causing extreme distortion (the curves that the bones follow all squish up at the origin).

I save the keyframes with LocRotScale for all objects at the start (frame 60), and these are the keyframes I’m copying to the end.

I’m still quite a beginner at blender animation, and I’m not sure what’s going wrong here.

Here is the .blend file, with the strange happenings when I pasted the starting data at the end of the animation (frame 160). WhaleLoopAnimProblem.blend (697 KB)

Can anyone advise me what might be going wrong, or how to correctly paste the keyframes to loop the animation?

Like maybe if someone can successfully loop the animation they can tell me in detail how they did it.

2

1st Don’t animate the whole armature in object mode. 2nd, select the armature in pose mode, copy keys, paste keys. Select the object controllers in object mode, copy, paste keys. I did it individually on the controllers and it worked. Don’t do them all at 1 time. I think it’s the fact you have keyframes the Armature on top of the bones but I could be mistaken.

3

Hi,

if your whale is moving in space and the controls for your hooks are not parented to a master/root bone, pasting the original keys will revert them to their original place. You need to have the body controls parented to a root control, and that’s the one that’ll be moving forward, dragging the other controls along.