Animation Questions

I think the Grease Pencil "Additive Drawing" checkbox copies each frame to the next one (the first question). Normally this is a good thing, but maybe not in this case.

I was also helped by a Grease Pencil tutorial on the web:
Grease Pencil Animation

(a little quick and sometimes hard to follow) which might answer some of the other questions.

Hey Matthew, about the slow playback of the reference video I've found that simplifying the scene to a subdivision level of zero got rid of the lag. Also it might help to increase the memory cache limit in the blender preferences under the system tab. (provided you have a decent amount of RAM of course)

Ok thanks for the help guys :)

Ill be back on this over the weekend so hopefully ill get on a little better.

And @waylow , I knew you couldn't hide from me forever , the new site bought you some time but now ive found you. Be prepared for more PM's full of questions :P

Ok , so  I got chance to have a play around tonight . It seems that the slow video playback is only on the first watch , and then after that it plays back fine. Although the frame dropping and simplifying subdivisions of the character helped a lot too.

As for the grease pencil, it is still behaving strangely. Ive managed to get it so that it draws a seperate image on each frame, and only shows the image drawn on that particular frame, but the issue now is that whatever the FIRST drawing I make is, stays on every frame. So if I draw a GP line on frame 1 , thaht one stays throughout the whole animation whilst others drawn after that only show on the frame they were drawn on. It means that the first pose I draw over Wayne in the ref, stays there right through, but the other poses disappear like they should when I scrub through. BUT this happens nomatter what frame I make my FIRST GP line on , so If I open up the file and jump straight to frame 30 , and make a GP line, and then scrub back to frame 1 , it is still there, and is there on EVERY frame.

EDIT** I think ive figured out the GP, the first stroke was going on  layer 1, and the second on a new layer, so the first was hanging around even when you drew another stroke because the new strokes were going on layer 2.

Hi @waylow  , I have a generalised question about my animation workflow. The problem has become apparent in the stomp jump , so ill use it as an example to try to explain my question. 

So , in the image below, the end of the jump is coming down way too vertical and looks off, the motion paths dont look terrible, but for some reason, the vertical-ness is exaggerated in the played animation, basically it looks like he is jumpuing across and then suddenly drops straight down at the end. Anyways, my questio is this : I have put all the later keyframes in , but I need to move stomp across the screen to follow the path I have drawn. But if I move him on that frame, he will then slide back to where he is in the following frames. I cant copy and paste the key to the other existing keys as he will just stick in that position. What I want to do is move him across on that frame, and have his position on X and Y propogate to the later keyframes relative to the move (yes sorry im explaining it terribly) . The only way I can see , is to take the X and Y values on the first key I move him on, and calculate the difference after I move him, and then add that difference to all the following frames. But that seems very tedious to me, and surely there is an easier way. Maybe im overcomplicating  it in my head. 

I suppose the simple way to ask it, is : is there a way to offset later poses to compensate for changing the position of an earlier pose, especially when those changes only affect one or two axis and the others need to stay as they were? 

** BTW , I realise its easy enough to move the heads position to get a nicer curve, but im talking about if you move the whole character so he lands much further across, so then all of his later positions will be messed up because he is in a different place. So how do you change those poses to suit without messing up everything?

Thanks in advance guys :) 

Hey Mathew, the way I would approach that is to go straight the Graph Editor and tackle those changes on the f-curves. I think that might be much easier than manually adjusting the later poses through the armature.

Ok thanks guys , Ill have a play about, I did not realise the propogate tool could work on certain channels., I juts thought it copied the selected pose to the chosen frames. 

Cool :) 

Ok so I had a play about, and Im getting my head around things better. However, I love, and get the idea of the propogate tool, but I cant find much info or videos on how it works. 

So far, ive managed to propogate a pose to a few later keyframes by doing the following : 

Going to the frame with the correct pose on it and selecting the bones I want to Propogate, then selecting the keys that I want to propogate to inside the dope sheet, and then choosing "propogate to selected frames" 

Am I doing this right , and if so, then lets say I only wanted to propogate the X and Y rotation channels on a bones pose, and not anything else, how do I do that? 

Thanks :) 

Hi @waylow  , I have another animation question :P 

Lets say you have a character that is walking through a scene and he needs to travel a distance that is further than he will get with the standard 24 frame cycle that we did in the bootcamp (say he needs to go the distance that would be covered in 3 cycles) . How would you approach making him walk this distance?

Would you animate the whole thing, so you are animating the all three cycles , or would you animate one cycle and duplicate the keys and make all the necesarry changes in the graphs and values. Or is there some way of adding cycle modifiers and applying them to a certain frame to give you the duplicated walk?

I really hope its the last way , but I cant seem to figure out how you apply modifiers , and as for the second way , I tried that and it just confused me, because from what I understand , you would have to manually figure out and input the values to give you the result that a cycle mod with offset would give you on the feet and torso, and then just duplicate and paste the rest - which seems like a long way around just applying the cycle modifiers you already have on to a set frame. As for the first method, that again seems like un-necesarry work unless you really want a unique cycle that has more character to it because it is not a perfect copy each cycle. 

Anyways, I did a lot of playing around and that is my thinking, but Ive hit the stage where It would be good to know the correct way to do it rather than just guessing and experimenting.

Thanks for any input you can offer. 

Ok thanks @Waylow , that helps, however, regarding solution C , I often use the cycle with offset to make my character walk indefinitely , but with cycle modifiers , the actual keyframes only exist up until Frame 25 and then are just repeated. What I was meaning was if I was to then want to add animation after these cycles, can I just go to the relevant frame and start animating? Because surely that would mess up the cycle modifiers?

And in regards to solution  D , with the GE adjustments , I take it that is just using maths to calculate the positions of the feet and torso bones to give the same output as a cycle modifier with offset would give? 

Finally, one last question - I tried animating my first translational run cycle last night and I kind of winged it. But I ran into trouble when I had to duplicate the first contact pose to the last one to make a perfect cycle. Because the contact pose was a lot more dynamic, I couldnt work out how to make them both identical.... is there a trick to this because the back leg was in the air and it was no longer possible to just copy the foot roll bone and paste it to the last frame because the foot was now positioned on multiple axis : 

Thanks again :) 

More questions again :) 

@waylow , if you get a chance, could you take a look at my last post please, and also one more question I have regarding the body meachanics course: 

I noticed this issue when I didn the stomp jump, and it has become more troublesome in the rivet jump that I am currently doing - regarding the feet at take off and landing, which do you use to get the feet to smoothly peel off the ground and then flatten out as they hit the ground on landing again without penetrating the floor and aslo to look natural? The toe pivot, the foot roll or the actual foots rotation? 

Nomatter how many times I watch the timelapses of you doing it, I cant figure out whats going on exactly. My instinct is to use the toe pivot, as that naturally pivots from the front of the foot, which is how you land when you jump and your toes touch first. The actual foor rotation seems to cause big issues with penetration , and im not sure about the foot roll , because it only pivots from the ball of the foot. 

Im kinda feeling that the foot roll may be good for take off , and the toe pivot for landing, or maybe even a combination of the two for both, but frustration has got the better of me so I am coming on here to ask the correct way to do it :) 

Thanks if you or anybody else can spare the time to answer this. I am going to practice some walk cycles in the mean time.