I feel silly asking, because I'm guessing the answer is as simple as "end the animation after keyframe XX where XX is 5 times the frames in the animation cycle", but I feel like I'm missing something.
Yeah that's exactly it. Say for example your animation is 10 frames long, so from frame 1 to 10, but you don't make it to 10, you cut it at frame 9. You make it so that frame 10 is exactly as frame 1. So when it reaches frame 9 when it goes back to 1, it just now loops. Does that makes sense?
Hi Ernest.
You said it.
If your cycle is 10 frames long, so it starts of f01 and ends on f11 (where the last frame is the same as the first).
Then you would animate in Blender and set the end frame to f10 (1 frame short).
Once your animation is complete, make sure you have cyclic modifiers on all the relevant controls and then change the end frame to be 1 frame short of 5 loops.
What's the easiest way to do this?
Click in the End frame input box and type "* 5" and press enter (that's asterix for 'times') - viola.
Just make sure you don't type over the existing number.
Perfect responses! Thanks so much! At first I had forgotten that you can do basic calculations in almost any field ( I remembered that you can do it in the scale/transform/etc. fields) but after I had a good think on a long dog walk, I came back and figured it out!