animatinng on twos

[MCronin]

How exactly do you work on twos in 3D? You only have to create keys and the computer does all your tweens. If you only want to do half the rendering, you just work at 12 or 15 fps.

[steveblake]

You're right, yes, it's only if you were to be working with stop motion, you'd spend most of the time animating on two's to get a snappy 'chunky' look to your motion. Plus it's a HUGE timesaver! so, as well as result of necessity it has also developed into a unique and interesting 'look'.

Of course there are times, with fast movements that you may pad out your frames and go to ones, to get a smoother look. Depends really, on the shot at hand.

I guess, I'm just trying to emulate the traditional ways and my reason for asking is that whilst, yes, I could cut out every other frame - I'm thinking of ways to switch between two's and one's whilst animating, it's just an experiment really...

Also allowing the computer to "do all the inbetweens" is fatal! As animators it's upto us to make all the decisions about timing, eases and breakdowns. It's a tradeoff between time and letting the computer do as little as possible - Even to the point of duplicating a frame to hold back movement where necessary (2's) - I suppose we're all control freaks round here!

Regards

[steveblake]

twos.mel seems to work on one object at a time, which is a shame...

[beaker]

You really dont have to animate as twos, just render ever 2nd frame. In the render globals just change the "by frame" to 2. Then to get it to play correctly if you are going out to tape. When you load up the animation into your video editor, set the single image import to equal 2 frames instead of 1. Most editors have this ability.

[steveblake]

Thanks for that, that WOULD be the easy anser, but I'm thinking of more involved ways - of being aware of which frames I'm keying - since I'd like to know which frames I'll finally be dropping!

I think the answer will either be:

Get a TD involved
or
Pay lots of close attention to the dope sheet

cheers

[MCronin]

I see animating on twos in 3D as making things hard for yourself. Look at it this way. The only reason why classical animators worked on twos was because it effectively cut their work load in half. They found that by working on twos they could still express most movements effectively, and it took much less time and resources. They weren't doing it for artistic reasons. In 3D, take a walk cycle for example. You may have a 15 frame cycle with only 5 key frames on the pelvis, you are effectively working on three's. Maybe the neck only has 3 keys in those 15 frames; you are working on five's there. You are saving ton's of time and effort and creating very fluid motion. If you need to goto one's on certain joints in certain parts of the cycle, you do it. The time slider and frames are almost irrelevent because you can place keys inbetween whole frames and scale animation curves to your liking. you can work on one's for joints that require it, halves for other joints, two's for others, fives for others, or even 100's if that's all that's required, and you can do it all at the same time in the same animation. Iwerks, Disney, Avery, Jones, etc., these guys probably all would've killed to be able to have this sort of speed and flexibility in the 30's 40's and 50's. Can you imagine if you wen't back an showed these guys technology that would allow them to animate in this fasion? Being able to set keys anywhere every thousandth of a frame to every thousand frames? It would have blown their minds.

If you really really have to work on one's and two's in a strict sense, set your playback to a normal speed 24 or 30 FPS. Key everything every odd frame for twos, and when you need to go to one's key everything every frame. Then, use your dopesheet or whatever to generate a render script that'll pick and choose explicitly which frames to render.

[jschleifer]

Ha! haven't seen that twos.mel script in years! :) I wrote that a while ago to help people who were wanting to have only SOME of their objects operate on twos, but w/out having to modify their keys.. basically it just takes the time connection going into the anim curves on an object and puts an expression on it. pretty simple really..

-jason

[steveblake]

jschleifer:
Would it be easy to use it to animate mulitple objects?? (or in fact a whole selection of handles and attributes) - Also feeling the need to do it for a certain section of frames and not the whole sequence.

MCronin:
Interesting point, and on the whole I agree. But I suppose the point is that in this case I want to make things hard for myself. I'm not sure animation is always about acheiving smooth results. I think that now that we've almost nailed photorealism in CG we should try and go a bit further and expolore a bit.

Much of the charm of stop motion is because of the snappy / quirky feel to the movement. But in this case it's just an experiment ...

[jschleifer]

yeah, suppose you could do it on multiple objects.. and as for doing it at various times, simply modify the expression to check frame ranges.. shouldn't be too tough. :)

the main thing is just making sure that the anim curves get connected to this expression.. that's why I did it on an object basis, because they need to already have keys on them to get it to work.

-jason

[Ripley]

I just don't get why or how you would animate every two frames? Does that even apply in 3D? I don't think so but feel free to try convince me otherwise. As for getting the look of stop motion, that's in the editing not in the animation. If you want your animation choppy just turn your curves to linear.

Its impossible to do in 3d unless you do it in rendering and editing. Cuz as soon as you change your fcurve, all your doing is changing the animation, there will still be a key on every frame. The computer will inbetween for you, that's the whole point of it.

I'm confused! lol Good luck with it.

[jschleifer]

well, in the case where I wrote this, they wanted to match the 3d animation with 2d animation that was in as an imageplane. This way they could animate however they want, playblast, and it would all sync up. Otherwise, the 2d animation would look choppy against the 3d.

-jason

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