Need Keyframe Help

[Gary]

Hi all,

 

I'm starting up again with exercise 6 after being away for quite a while, and I'm running into a problem right off the bat. I want to have Shaggy walk up to the door before he tries to open it, so Ive made a path, dropped Shaggy onto it and then dropped a "resolute walk" action onto him. When he gets up close to the door, I'm hitting the "force keyframe" button at frame 30, moving his hand up to the door and placing his feet together on the ground (in skeletal mode), moving the frame counter ahead by about 3 frames and then hitting "Force Keyframe" again. What happens is that the hand and foot motions I've changed are stretched out over the entire 33 frames instead of from just frame 30 to 33. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or if maybe I have the wrong idea about keyframes, but I thought that the animation would be phased in between the two keyframes. Can someone point me in the right direction?

 

Thanks,

 

Gary

[Slipin Lizard]

Hey Gary. When you have this problem, what is happening is that a key frame isn't being created where you thought it would be. So when you hit "force keyframe" you thought that there would be a keyframe created at that time, and the original at zero, so that his hand motion would stay the same up until that point, and you could now start a new movement.

 

 

What you need to do is kind of think backwards. Go to the frame where you want the hand to start moving, and adjust it to its begining position. Just moving it around a little will create a keyframe. You can even "nudge" it with the arrow keys up one step, then back down, or side to side so it creates a keyframe without actually having changed position.

 

Now go back to frame "0" and make sure that the hand position is where you want it, and check the animation between those to keyframes, your hand should not move. Now you can jump ahead to where you want the hand to move up, position it, and you should have the desired result of the hand holding its position, then moving to the new one.

 

It really helps if you have the timeline window open, and know how to create keyframes in the timeline itself.

 

Create a new choreography, and import a simple primitive from the library like a cube. Now, make the cube do ONE type of action, say move from one side of the screen to the other on ONLY the X axis. If you open the timeline window and see the graph below, you'll actually see the keyframe you created. You can click on that keyframe and move it up or down, changing its value. You can select a different frame in the timeline, and actually just click to add a new keyframe and again, set its value by moving it up or down. Play around with a simple primitive like this first and get a feel to how the time line works. It really helps.

[Gary]

Thanks very much, I'll give that a try tonight. One other question on the same topic: since I dropped a "resolute walk" action on Shaggy at frame 0, when I get to the end of the path where I want him to come to a stop and reach out for the doorknob, do I need to jostle all the bones that were active in the walk cycle to get them to effectively come to a stop as I add more frames, or will it automatically stop the walk cycle when the end of the path is reached?

 

Thanks again,

 

Gary

[Slipin Lizard]

I'm not super good at animating, but yeah, you need to do what's called "creating a channel". So whatever part of the body you want to move later in an animation, you need to estabilsh key frames for earlier if you want to hold it in place at the start. It sounds like you've got the right idea, and once you play around with the timeline and see the channel created for keyframes as you place them, you'll have a good grasp on what is going on.

 

The "Animate" CD's from Anzovin are pretty helpful with all this stuff.

[Gary]

Well, I tried what you suggested by nudging the hand and foot at frame 30 to create keyframes for them, but I still have the same problem - the hand and foot no longer operate properly in the walk cycle from frame 0, but transition to the new setting gradually from frame 0 up to frame 30. It seems that anywhere I create a keyframe it then affects the previous walk cycle. I think that I need a way to isolate the walk cycle from any subsequent manipulation I do to the character, and I can't figure out how to do that. I'm sure it's something pretty simple that I'm just ignorant of and when I hear the solution I'll probably smack myself upside the head. I've been trying to find any information about transitioning from an action to manual manipulation in the Help and Technical Reference guides, but no luck. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Gary

[Slipin Lizard]

Gary, not sure what the problem is, I think you need to play around with it some more and get the hang of how to manipulate things in the timeline. I just tried my own advice, and it worked no problem at all. What I did is this: Dropped Shaggy into choreography, created a new path and constrained him to it; added "Resolute Walk", default is 1 second, I stretched it to 3 seconds to get a slower walk; wiggled his arm at frame 0, at frame 3:00, and then set a new position for the arm at 3:15. Lastly, I open the dope sheet and make sure to set the path to the same duration as the resolute walk action.

 

It works fine, Shaggy walks up and then stops, immediately reaching up for the door. It takes awhile to get the hang of animation, just using the interface. I would recommend you try some simple stuff first, and get the feel of knowing you've created a channel and are setting keyframes at specific points in time. If you're nudging stuff around in the Choreography, and just hoping that a keyframe is being created at that point, then you're not going to know what's going on. You need to know how to look at the graph in the timeline and confirm that keyframes have been created where you want them.

 

Later, you'll want to manipulate the curve of your keyframes, to make a ball bounce realistically for instance, so its good to get the hang of using the graph right away. Hope that clears things up a bit, I don't know.