Splines

to learn this trick I will be reading and learning from “how to cheat Maya”

to get a grip on the use of splines im going to follow a disc tutorial that came with the book, using “The Goon” rig as the character I am using for my project isn't finished yet.

The file loads up and im given an arm movement that rotates up on the z axis, here is a playblast of what I am viewing.

this is what it all looks like in my graph editor

as you can see by the movement its all very even and in the graph editor they are more or less the same distance away from eachother. I am also told in the book that even though the graph editor shows the line going down, the arm is moving up, the book stresses that this is because it is not a direct representation of what happens but its just a change in value, depending on the rig, depends on what way the arm will move.

EXPERIMENTING WITH SPLINES:

what the book really stresses is just to experiment with the splines in the graph editor, and thats apparently the easiest way to grasp what theyre all about so here are a few playblasts and screen shots of what happens when I change the value's using the graph editor.

Okay what i've done here is make the dip a little harsher in the graph editor, trying to make the curves angle much more shallow

what happens here is that after frame 16 the value changes so that the speed gets slower after

Okay now what ive done is i've lifted the keyframe all the way up past the original value at frame one, and because of that reason it seems that the arm will go back in the opposite direction, shown in the playblast below:

Okay with this next one what ive done is Ive brought the last frame all the way down so that the value is zero, I predicted that the arm after frame 16 would come to a stop,

right final one, what i've decided to do is completely reverse the first example we were given and hopefully what we will be looking for is a reverse outcome!

okay so yeah my theory was correct the playblast below is an exact opposite of the first video up above, I feel like im starting to see how these splines work and how using them in my final piece could really help tweek things up a bit.

So back to doing the tutorial.

For this next part I am told to open up a different file so this is why The Goon is now gone and it is replaced by a ball. This part of the tutorial is looking at Tangent types .

This tutorial is to show how much changing the tangent type can effect the shape of a movement.

the spline tangent shows us smooth interpolation, and its good on transitional keys where the curve is the same direction on both sides this tends to create overshoots in the curve.

clamped tangents have smooth interpolation and unlike the spline tangent it doesn't overshoot keys with close or identical values, the first and last keys in the curves are splined , its also good for moving from spline mode to stepped keys

The Linear tangent gives you a direct line from key to key and it makes spacing between two keys perfectly even, sharp angles into curves makes this tangent tool very useful for keys where an object meets another object at full momentum, tis can also be used for blocking to prevent any computer created eases.

creates plateu's at keys that are perfectly flat, automatically puts an ease-out and ease-in on a key, it never overshoots and its good for keys at extremes and its also good for keys where a value needs to hold through frames.

For stepped tangent there are no interpolation between keys, it holds until the next keyframe and is used for pose to pose blocking.

Plateau tangents are exactly the same as clamped tangents except the first and last keys in the curve are flat.

above are picture references to show how the splines should look for certain purposes, these will come in handy when it comes to animating my final piece.

In conclusion I definitely will be using splines in my final piece, its a nice clean simple way to tidy up an animation. Its one of them things that look a lot more complexed than it is. Unfortunately I couldn't really apply it to my own stuff just yet but ill defintiely refer back to this post when I do use it.