Animating an object accelerating?

#1

I’ve been a LW user for a while, but have never really had any experience animating. I now find myself needing to make (what I thought was) very simple animation, I’ve hit a wall and I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something.

All I need is a spaceship that flies into frame, slows down and comes to a stop, hovering. I’ve been trying to keyframe it, but I can’t get a smooth deceleration, it’s all crap, jerking from key frame to key frame in a series of every decreasing constant velocity segments. I’ve tried adding more and more keyframes to try and increase the number of ‘steps’ in the motion to smooth it out, but I’m not really getting anywhere near smooth decceleration.

I’ve looked at the Keyforce plug-in, but haven’t had much joy. I’ve also searched for tutorials or something that may shed some light, but I’ve found nothing, which makes me think (hope) that there is something incredibly simple that I’m just overlooking in my stupidity. Anyone able to point me in the right direction?

#2

Have you played with teh Graph Editor yet?
I would set up two keyframes, and then control the deceleration using a bezier curve in teh graph editor.

#3

You can usually do deceleration in just 3 keyframes. Say you want the spaceship to stop at frame 100.
Adjust the 100th keyframe Tension for all curves (in graph editor) to 1

Go to a frame close to 100th, lets say 96 and hit enter in layout (not in graph editor)
This is probably a position very close to the final.
Pull that keyframe back (to frame 50 or less) to give more time between those two close positions. Go back to graph editor and adjust the tension on keyframe 50 to lose the bump on the curve between keyframes 50 and 100. That should give you a nice smooth deceleration for your object.

The keyframes I mentioned are arbitrary, you have to play with your timing and adjust your curves in graph editor, but that technique works quite well at least for me.

And anyway, Graph editor is your friend, learn it inside out if you want to do animation in the future. :wink:

#4

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