Animation: What all can be changed at keyframes
Scavenger
Posts: 2,674
in The Commons
I'm doing some preliminary experiments with animation. I'm wondering, what can be changed at the keyframes? I know poses can be. Can morphs? Lights? turned on and off? What about objects being added (un invisbiled)? Can cameras move? Can camera's be switched?
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Most all physical properties can be keyframed. Position, Rotation, Scale, Morphs, etc. Textures and material parameters cannot (without scripts from mCasual or plugins available at DAZ). Cameras, lights, nulls, can all be animated, though some properties of them may not keyframe (I've never tried animating lights except for their position/rotation/scale parameters.)
Iray shaders (for some UNKNOWN reason) still do not have a time or frame parameter, though I believe the RDL parameter can still be imported and used by an Iray shader in Shader Mixer. Not sure how well that works though.....
Objects can be scaled to zero (or as near as makes no nevermind) to disappear them. Or moved out of frame instantaneously.
Cameras cannot be switched, but you can fake a cut by getting animations you like on two cameras, then setting up a third camera for a cut, copying one camera to the cut camera at the end of its time, and the other to the cut camera a frame later.
I highly recommend perusing mCasuals scripts......lots of stuff for animation (mcjAutoLimb, MatAnim, etc.)
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/
Would you need to have 2 keyframes right next to each other for that? what about motion bluring?
Yes. And you often need to tweak the splines a little.
Oddly enough, I almost never use motion bluring, and have never played tricks with this in a motion blur situation.
You usually have to edit the curve interpolation as well, since it can result in very wierd curvature of the change. And often you'll need 3 keyframes. One before, the actual value keyframe, and one after. And even then, the curvature of the default spline interpolation can cause issues.
Motion blur can be good, where appropriate. Note that Iray doesn't support motion blur in DAZ currently.
I personally find it easier and better to simple render individual frames (not whole animations) so that when i reach the point at which something disappears, I can simply change the scene, then render the rest of the frames. Then I build the video file from the frames (lots of apps available to do this.)
i.e., render frames 0-299. Frame 300 is where X disappears, so then I hide X's node. Now I render frames 300-999. Once done, I use AfterEffects, or some other video compiler, and create a video file from all 1000 frames.
Curvature of the spline....more words to look into:)