Keyframing in 3D Apps
Keyframing in 3D applications - soft interpolation vs linear
Hi, prompted by a question by Jason, here's a look at what happens and why when you keyframe in Cinema 4D.
As default, Cinema 4D uses curves between keyframes, making your animation smooth, which is usually a good thing.
However, look at the following example. Lets say I want a ball to move, STOP, then move again, in a straight line. We make a start begin keyframe at -500x, two stop keyframes at 100x, and an end keyframe at 500x.
The ball moves, then comes back a bit, goes forward a bit, then continues to the end... aaaaargh!
A quick look at the fcurves explains everything (above). Instead of looking at points in time, we're looking at ALL the time, all the animation. Clearly, there's an S curve in the X Position line.
If we select the keyframes in the fcurves and look at the Attribute inspector (highlighted on the right), we have a lot of control over this:
Each keyframe can specify how the animation will continue before and after it; Soft (bezier), linear, custom, whatever we need.
So we set both keyframes' before and after (L interpolation and R interpolation) to linear to make the ball sit still. Incidentally, <--> in these menus means 'do what the last keyframe did'.
The F-curves window is massively useful in all it's incarnations across 3D apps, and is well worth playing with and getting used to.
Tagged as 3D, Animation, Cinema4d, keyframing, Training & Learning + Categorized as Training & Learning