Held Keys

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Held Keys // Roundtable

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Post by frank // Jan 30, 2006, 12:05pm

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Total Posts: 709
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Some of you may be familiar with Keith Lango's Pose-to-Pose Pop Thru animation tutorial (http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/popThru.html)


In the first pass of the method, you basically hit the poses with no interpolation. You'd have your character at frame 1, frozen until he hits frame 7, for instance.


I have tried setting the keyframes to Sharp, but from what I can tell, this is just linear interpolation.


To get around this, you can set double-keys in this manner:


- Frame 1: Character sitting


- Frame 20: Character standing


- Copy Frame 1 to frame 19. In this way, the character is sitting throughout the frames 1 - 19 and "pops" up on frame 20.


This accomplishes the "pop-thru" portion of this animation method, BUT you have all these additional keyframes in the way. It would be so much better to have a single key for each pose.


In Maya it's called a "stepped key" and in Hash: AM, it's a "held key".


Is there a way to accomplish this in trueSpace?

Post by mrbones // Jan 30, 2006, 1:18pm

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I believe there is Frank,

I called it bracing or bracketing and you could use clips. Also vb script recorder might be able to accomplish this to.
I will post more after I review the link.

Thanks!

Post by frank // Feb 2, 2006, 8:52am

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After some experimentation, there appears to be no way to do stepped or held keys in any version of trueSpace. The closest you can get, using single keys, is with linear interpolation. That softof defeats the purpose, though, as you want the character to "pop" through the poses (not "slide" through) on the first pass. Once you get that right, then you'll work through and maybe reintroduce curved interpolation. Personally I usually key every other frame once I start working on the final passes so linear is fine with me.


As mentioned above, the workaround would be to use double keyframes but the goal iis to have minimal keyframes at first - like an animatic - and then work out the detail. Also, those double keyframes have to be linear. Otherwise, a character posed on frame 0 and posed exactly the same on pose 10 would still move due to curved interpolation, with the peak being at frame 5.

Post by mrbones // Feb 3, 2006, 11:01pm

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As long as frame 10 and frame one were the same keyframe there would be no movement. If there was a frame 5 then it would move unless it was the same keyframe again. ( a copyed and pasted one) Thats what I used to do making walkcycles. I would copy frame one and paste it on frame ten. Then at frame 5, I would pose the legs opposite of the main frame 1 and ten pose. Then I would go back to frame 3 and bend the right knee, then i would go to frame 7 and bend the other knee. So baically I ould have 5 frames total and 4 total poses. Stretch that clip out to 20 frames long. Creating one seamless loop. that I could also put on a path and repeat. Now Im just a mocap guy, I can make a walk cycle in 1 second in TrueSpace if I want, Sometimes I like to animate by hand, I started out making claymation movies back in the early 80's too:) To make a long story short, If you would like to add this feature that you want in TrueSpace 7.1 We will have to work on it to make it happen for you. Cheers

Post by Bobbins // Feb 4, 2006, 6:39am

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Total Posts: 506
As Frank points out holding the keys using double keyframes does work - but only as long as the keyframes are sharp. If you have smoothed keyframes which is the default then you do get motion since the f-curves are, well - curved!


Pop-Pose was tried in the Scene Editor a while back but the difficulty was in removing it and restoring the original or un-popped keys.

Post by chamaeleon // Feb 4, 2006, 12:18pm

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Total Posts: 74
The problem with just duplicating a frame and putting it just before the next keyframe to get the held position is of course that in order to get the "correct" behaviour when you insert a keyframe in-between, you'll have to replace that additional keyframe with the new one you just created and adjust the curve properties for each new keyframe as you go along. Doable, but this is work the computer should be able to do for you, and you get tired of it real fast. Also, two consecutive frames having identical values does not guarantee no change in motion (unless the curve properties are tweaked). Basically, you quickly lose the point of doing pose-pop as you're almost doing as much work as the final (rough, at least) animation would take anyway.

Post by frank // Feb 4, 2006, 12:28pm

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Well said, Chamaeleon! I agree 100% with your assessment.
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