CGTalk - Change FPS settings without moving Keys?

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Horganovski

01-17-2009, 08:11 PM

So I'd like to like to change my lovingly-crafted walkcycle which lasts for 32 frames and has keys on nearly every frame for many of the controllers, from 25FPS to 24FPS so that I can merge this scene with another one that was animated at 24FPS.

But whatever way I try it Cinema insists on moving my keys once I change the project FPS , so now instead of being on whole numbers they are in between the frame numbers. I've tried Make Relative and Lock Time for all of the keys but nothing has worked so far.

All I want is for the cycle to last for the same amount of frames, but the project to be changed from 25 to 24FPS. I know I can go in and fix things by moving the keys around but that seems like a very poor workflow. Surely there's a better way?

Any ideas appreciated.

BTW Still on 10.5, so NLA is not an option.

Cheers,
Brian

Per-Anders

01-17-2009, 08:19 PM

Just select the keys and scale them back up by moving the end handle. The reason your keys change their frame indexes is that keys store the time (as a fraction to really work in seconds) not the frame themselves as their position. This is because when you're animating what's important (most of the time) is timing, not neatness of the timeline.

Horganovski

01-17-2009, 09:23 PM

Thanks for the reply, that's the method I've been making do with but I find it's not always predictable, for example if you have keys on the last and 2nd to last frames sometimes when you scale the entire sequence they stay together, sometimes you end up with a frame between them. If this happens spread throughout a whole animation sequence the result is a mess.

It is essential to me that the interpolation stays the same, I wish I could make the keys keep their frame numbers while changing the project settings. I guess I'll just have to plan ahead more, but this does seem a cumbersome workflow to me.

In Maya when you go to the FPS settings for the project there's a 'Keep Keys at Current Frames' option you can enable when changing the project FPS. I guess that's what I'm looking for in Cinema.

Cheers,
Brian

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