Skip to main content

Cure - Baked and Stepped Keys

To match my stlyised environment I wanted to apply a kind of stop-motion style to my animation. Throughout animating, I've made sure to animate how I normally would so that I still get all of the right curves before I start to make it stop-motion-esque. The first time I did these tests I simply went though the curve editor and every 2 or 4 frames made a key. It was tedious and time consuming so I now know that to achieve this quickly I can simply bake my animation.

Baking means I can chose how often a key frame is added, whether it's every 2 or 4 frames and lets me keep any unbaked keys as well if there is a mistake in the animation.


Once the keys are baked, I can then simply select the curve and set the tangents to stepped.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cure - Advanced Skeleton 5

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point.  There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de...

Cure - Animation Tests

I created a really simple and rough animation to test out a kind of animation style I had been looking in to. I know I don't want something smooth or too natural looking as it wouldn't match the character art or environment. I recently saw the Into the Spider-Verse trailer and was really intrigued by this kind of 'stop-motion' style of animation so gave it a go in Maya. I tried the animation with auto tangents before switching to stepped tangents on every 2nd frame and then every 4th (roughly). I actually really like 4s but I want to see how this looks with a full body animation rather than just facial.

Cure - Dying Polygons

Today was spent trying to work out how to make a face try black then fall off of my character as she was moving. In prior tests, this was easy as she was just a static model but with a rig in her and animation it complicates things in Unity. After a lot of trial and error my best method that I can (hopefully) repeat for other polygons is as follows: I need to duplicate the model as a whole with the input graph, then delete every face that isn't the one 'dying'. Duplicating with the input graph keeps the rig and animation intact. This polygon also has to be slightly pulled away from the mesh so that it doesn't intersect and cause strange rendering glitches. Keeping this individual face means that I can animate it on its own in Unity. I animate the alpha channel from 0 - 1. Going from transparent to opaque. This is set from 0-60 frames (2 seconds) I then need to have another duplicate of the face with no history. This polygon then has no rig, or an...