animation "head bob" quirkiness

lbartels

Hello,

I am working on my first animation project. So I'm probably missing something.

Anyway.. I created a series of about a dozen pose presets I want my character to move through. I opened up the timeline pane, and started on frame 0, with the starting pose, then 15-20 frames later (moved the downward facing arrow at the top) I chose the next pose preset. And so on through the entire project.

Everything seemed (past tense) to work fine. Then I slowly dragged the pointer through the timeline. For some reason, after one key, the character does a head bob. She raises her head as if moving to a new pose. Then starts to move on to the next key.  It's as if there's a hidden key (and pose) there. It's wierd.

And yes, the head-bob shows up in the render too.  I can't see any reason why the movement would do this wierd.

What do I look for? I'm totally bamboozled on this one.

Thanks.

P.S.  I also want to add camera movement into my animation, but I don't know how to do that. I tried simply looking through the camera, and changing view points as time went by, but no keys are entered.

Richard Haseltine

Most likely this is interpolation at work - by default DS tries to have the actual graph of the value 9see the graph area at the bottom of the Timeline) follow a smooth curve, so it quite easy to get unexpected overshoots that cause an excursion beyon the values you have set. You can fine-tune the exiting keys, add new keys to try to pin the curve down, or adjust the interpolation settings - different situations may require different approaches, or mixes of approaches.

lbartels

A little more to report.

I don't know why it's happening, but I think I know the circumstances as to when it's happening.

I have about 10 keys in the total timeline. I put in the first 4 or 5, then skipped to the end for the 10th, then went back to the middle and added more.
It seems that when I futzed around with keys that had keys later in the timeline, things would go wonky.

At one point, I got so frustrated that I got cleared all of the keys (under clear animation) and layed them back in in chronological sequence.  That seemed to clear the issue.

It seems that the key-to-key changes kind of "linger" and those were affecting the character movement. When you put in a new key in the middle of a project, the interpolation only changes a few frames on either side of that key.

If there were a way to reset or recalculate the timeline.