Moho Forum

Hi people!

Does anyone know if there is a way to adjust the graph curves manually?

Like you can with other graphs...eg Flash, AfterEffects, ...etc

I know you can set ease in/out etc... But what if you want an extreme ease in/out?

thanks

Keyframes work only from its own frame to forward.
Easy in/out and Ease in Ease out (as well as all keyframes) work only from the frame it its inserted to the next keyframe and affect to both keyframes. So for a final keyframe you can only ask for Ease out and need to set it in the previous keyframe (you can set one of this two: Ease in/out or Ease out)

Same steps if you want linear finish for your final keyframe. You should set the previous keyframe to linear.

BTW Easy out and Ease in makes the other portion of line (in the opposite keyframe) set to smooth.

-G

Thanks, Genete,

but I think that doesn´t answer the original question. I was also looking for a manual graph editing solution in anime studio pro but I fear this actually not possible. I haven´t found it yet...

In After Effects or Flash you can directly edit the graphs and you are thus able to control the interpolation between keyframes much more subtle. You can define special speed ramps or extreme ease ins and outs if you like. The predefined interpolation curves anime studio provides (smooth, ease in etc...) are just a subset of what is possible in other packages.

Marco

Yes, thank you Genete

But, Marcotronic is right... I was looking for 'handles' to adjust the shape/curvature of the curve (like Flash, Maya etc ...) so that I can make more extreme ease in/out etc... as opposed to the default curves.

Thanks marcotronic... If the above does not exist...I guess the next best thing is to put extra keyframes in to favour the extreme keys?

Thanks guys!

No consolation, I know, but I have been asking for this feature for years now. It's my opinion that no program can call itself a professional animation tool if users don't have absolute control over ease-in/outs (I always point to the way Animo handles this as being well nigh perfect). The only work round is to set keys for every single frame, I am afraid.

I set out how I would like ease ins/outs implemented here:
http://www.animationpost.co.uk/notes2/fairings.htm


Jeff G.

jeff wrote:It's my opinion that no program can call itself a professional animation tool if users don't have absolute control over ease-in/outs

Absolutely!!! I think, too, that this is one of the basic features an animation software should have!

Marco

It's my opinion that no program can call itself a professional animation tool if users don't have absolute control over ease-in/outs

Well, there's the difference between animators and people who just use animation software ...

Keyframes. More keyframes. Or is there a federal law against using more than two keys per movement?

Hi slowtiger,

of course you can do everything manually - you don´t even need a computer for animating (especially you - with your "old school background" - as I can see on your website. I guess when you started animation many years ago you were just used to drawing each and every frame manually (a fact that I really admire)) But why should one "waste" time using lots of keyframes when more or less professional tools provide things like f-curves (giving the same result in less time) for saving the animator´s time? I can´t imagine that tools like Cinema4D, Motionbuilder, After Effects, Maya etc. provide those f-curves just as a gimmick.

I´m just a beginner as far as animation is concerned and I appreciate your knowledge and your skills - so my question is: Would you really say that editable f-curves in animation are sort of a "work of the devil" and animators should use more keyframes instead? From what I personally experienced so far in Cinema4D and After Effects - I would really miss them if they were suddenly gone... They are an enormous timesaver - and time is money...

Thanks,
Marco

I'd never say that one way to do this is superior over the other - it's always the result that counts. So, as long as the results are the same, nobody cares about how it was achieved, except the production supervisor who's responsible to cut costs everywhere ...

But ... you get a different result, and it's clearly visible. (I should know because right now I'm stuck with a production where it's always "tweened" animation vs. hand-keyed-animation.)

"Tweened" animation, which means everything some software calculates from key to key, is easy to spot because it has that over-smooth look. This is because the underlying algorithm is modeled after basic kinemes like a free or damped oscillation, or an uniformly continuous acceleration. Movements like this occur in reality - but in this pure form only with machines. With characters - or worse: with cartoony characters, those movements create a conflict.

The arm of a walking person is basically a pendulum. But if you just set two keys at the ends of the movement, your character's arms will swing very mechanically. There's no expression in there, and there's none of the other factors visible, like friction of clothing, small muscle contractions, the small movements everybody makes to maintain balance. No tweaking of the simple movement curve will ever cure that lack of expression. If you modify the curve, you only modify nature's parameters locally, like gravity, or the weight of the arm. You still don't introduce muscle activity into it. (Of course this wouldn't make any difference as long as I'm doing things on a very small level. If I'm tweaking a small arm movement within the range of 4 frames, no average audience will spot the diference wether I hand-tuned more keys or wether I adjusted the curves.)

I don't say it's bad to rely on tweened movements. But it should be a clear stylistic decision to use it or not. Ideally, one would use f-curves first to set the broad movements, then go in and add the "human factor" to it.

There's a section in Richard Williams' "Animator's Survival Kit" where he compares the mathematically correct solution with a hand-tweaked one (page 84ff.). You'll find lots of examples in classic cartoons where the technically correct flow of inbetweens was abandoned in favour of a much more dynamic movement.

You'll find some of this covered in this great article http://www.keithlango.com/wordpress/?p=644, which I urge you to read and follow the links. You don't have to change your working method, but you will have some more alternative ways to achieve things at your hands, which always is a good thing.

Hi slowtiger,

thanks a lot for your detailed elaboration on this topic. I think this will help me a lot with my future character animations. I´ve just started reading the "Animator´s Survial Kit", by the way But I didn´t know the KeithLango-Link. Very interesting! Thanks again.

Marco

Coming back to AnimeStudio keyframe topic, one of the things that confused me at the very beggining was the fact that the points go from keyframe to keyframe using a linear path. Even if you modify the extremes keyframes form smooth to linear or ease, the path still being a stragth line (becasue the keyframes only affects to the velocity of the movement, not the path of the movement). It happened to me when I missunderstood the Rotate Points tool (I thought it would truly rotate the points from one pose to other). It was frustrating discover that the shape was deformed during the tweening from pose to pose. Then it was when I discovered the power of bones...

It could be a really helping feature if we could set the path motion between keyframes to any kind of 2D beizer curve... Like the last feature in the next update for layer motion path but for points. Maybe I'm crazy but I imagine the first time people heard about "bones" probably though it was a crazy idea...

-G

Having worked with After Effects for the past 12 years I can say that when I started working with Anime Studio (then called Moho), I was quite dismayed that I couldn't control my inbetweens with bezier curves in the graph. In fact, the graph became rather pointless to me. As a result when I work in Anime Studio, my keyframe count goes up considerably and ultimately, my timeline is far more confusing than it would be in After Effects.

But then, After Effects doesn't do character animation nearly as elegantly as Anime Studio.

In the 'Feature Requests' column I've posted a few requests for beziers in the graphed timeline. Recently I noticed a heading of 'Top 10 Feature Requests', posted by eFrontier themselves. I figured that the developers might be paying more attention to this heading so I made my post.

In that post I modified my request to having a bar slider on the timeline which would scale to the keyframes (in case the user slid the keyframes forward or backward on the timeline), but could itself be moved forward or backward. This bar would essentially represent the midpoint of the two keyframes (being a different icon would differentiate it from a keyframe), and when it is slid it would therefore alter the ease in/ease out of the keyframes. I also reasoned to myself that something iconic, like a bar or some other graphic symbol, would be easier for the novice animator to understand and use than a pair of bezier handles on a timeline might be.

We'll see what happens. I think Anime Studio could certainly benefit from some kind of implementation of a bezier handle on the timeline, something far more customizable than a robotic, predefined setting in a pulldown menu.

As far as smear frames go ala "The Dover Boys", I think the subject gets a little off-topic. "The Dover Boys" was doing something unique, that while it's still important in animation, isn't entirely outside of the range of Anime Studio. You can still do something like that, you just have to draw every frame of it, perhaps in a switch layer.

What the topic of this thread is about is controlling the in-betweens of normal character animation. Sure, it would be nice if there was some way of easily implementing smear frames via AS, but I don't think that's what the original post-er had in mind when he asked about controls in the graphic timeline.

I just recently purchased Anime Studio and was also surprised and somewhat disappointed that there was no way to edit the animation curves in Anime Studio. I also find it a little frustrating that there is no way to turn off Auto Key (is there?). As a Flint compositor, I am used to absolute control over keyframing. I really hope these two things are implemented into Anime Studio in the future.

I'm glad there seems to a sort of general agreement that this is a big hole in an otherwise excellent program.

I have just been playing with the demo version of KoolMoves.
They don't fully implement ease ins/outs with the flexibility there should be either, but they do give a very wide choice of presets, all of which are excellent and far more useful than the ones in Anime Studio.

Jeff G.