Frustrating animated sequence Question.

michaelolson

Hi. I'm running into a strange problem. I have a Genesis 2 character I've draped with a dynamic robe ( all done in Daz ). In the 48 keyframe I've posed him with his arms crossed ( I'm doing this in 24 fps ). In the next key frame I have him squat down into a chair, still with his arms crossed. In the next keyframe I then open his arms. Here's where the problem begins. When I scrub backwards he no longer keeps his arms crossed as he sits in the chair, for some reason the last keyframe is influencing the whole sequence and he begins to open his arms as he sits down. Any suggestions how to fix this?

Thank You.

michaelolson

I should add is there a way to fix this without having to clear the animation and laying in the keyframes as saved poses all over again each time I make a future pose? It gets costly time wise having to re animate the cloth drape. One of the issues is, I need the cloth to fall a certain way and don't know in advance how it will fall, sometimes I need to move the body into a certain position to get the cloth to fall the way I want before I put the body in the correct position. All of this goes back to the first post above.

Testing6790

Hi! I don't know what they call it in DS exactly, but what you're experiencing is a side effect of the process of creating the animation called splining. When you pose your guy it creates keyframes for ever moved part and then blending them across the timeline. This has caused me unending torment, because if you're not careful you can make the transition a little wonky.

Fixing it is a b****, and I've never actually successfully done it well. The only thing I can do is offer ways to prevent it in the future.

1. If you're making animations use aniblocks if you have animate2. Once you get used to using keyframes in aniblocks it makes your life easier by orders of magnitude.

2. More keyframes the better. As you're moving forward, select every node on his body and create keyframes every 5 or so frames to prevent this (when posing for a drape).

I don't know what caused your exact problem, but this is how I handle similar things.

Edit: Yes I do.

When you opens his arms he didn't have another keyframe for them since he initially posed them, so the splining smoothed across every frame since you posed his arms. A thing that the default animation timeline is terrible as showing is that each node has it's own timeline. Look at the black dots. Now click on a finger. No black dots (Except maybe the beginning).

That's why I urge all non-advanced users (I consider myself non-advanced) to expand the whole figure, select every piece and create a keyframe for everything any time they would create one, to prevent these.

The only easy solution is to delete the keyframes and re-do it, as far as I know.

Disclaimer: All of what I said is completely a result of my trial and error and a bit of my 7th grade Animation class from over a decade ago.

michaelolson

Thanks Paradigm67 :)