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Newbie having trouble with a key framing issue
Hi, Cinema 4D newbie here, so I apologize if any of my terms are incorrect or confusing.
I am doing a independent study on C4D, emphasis on independent since my teacher has offered me very little support despite my requests, but I digress…
I am trying to animate a pineapple character dancing. I have rigged it using spline IK and that is functioning properly. I am using manual keyframes. I was successfully able to make a starting sequence where the camera zooms in then the pineapple taps one leg a few times. When I go to start a new movement (where I have both legs bent, using one standing still legs straight key frame in between) once I make the new keyframe it changes the entire animation so that the legs are bent. I have tried deleting that frame and starting over. I have also tried turning the camera on and off and deleting it altogether. No matter what I do, if I make this movement it changes the whole thing. I must be doing something wrong somewhere. I think I am only using position and rotation, but I am using a school computer, so I am not able to confirm that at the moment. I am using the newest version of the software.
From this description is anyone able to decipher my problem and have any thoughts on how to fix it? Does anyone have any suggestions on video tutorials that might help me with key framing and animating with cameras? I have watched dozens of youtube, greyscale gorilla, and pluralsight tutorials and can’t quite find what I am looking for. I am mostly seeing basic tutorials making cubes do very simple movements. Am I maybe better off just making a bunch of files and combining them in a video editing program? Are there better terms for what I am trying to accomplish that might help me in figuring this out?
I appreciate any help at all. Thanks for reading!
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3 Replies
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A couple of things:
It might be another keyframe at anothe time that is forcing the animation back to bent legs.
Using IK normally you don’t use rotation to position things (at least we don’t) you just drag the end point and the rest of the chain follows along. So it might be that the rotation you are adding in there is messing up the bone orientation and thereby messing with the IK chain.
Without seeing the project it’s going to be hard to tell what’s happened. Can you upload? -
Thanks for replying, internet stranger!
I tried using only position for my key framing yesterday, and it helped but it didn’t completely fix the issue. So then I made a second file to do a second move, and occasionally it would straighten or bend a leg after I had key framed it. But usually if I hit the button again after repositioning it fixed it. The animation is basically just the legs at this point, and I know my modeling isn’t that great either. And now my plan to edit them together seems to be going up in flames since FCP seems to not be recognizing the files (even though I previously uploaded others to it).
The original file:
The second file:
11531_pineapplemovetwo.c4d.zip
These are both the c4d files, but I can try and upload the .mov files if necessary.
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I can open those files just fine. I’m not sure I understand the problem as I can set keyframes and it doesn’t mess things up. One thing to note is that after he (she?) does his little tapping thing if you move the other leg, it hasn’t had a key frame set since the beginning so the computer will interpolate the move you just made back to the start position over the 240 frames it takes to get to the tapping. So that might seem like its messing things up but in reality its just slowly changing the legs position over that many frames. This may be true of other limbs and their positions/rotations. Remember if you haven’t keyframed one of the three attributes for each of these two aspects (x,y,z and h, p, b) it will interpolate back to the last key frame set, or be a new key frame that will anchor that joint in place until you set another keyframe.
On another note, if you set limits or restrictions for your joints, your Ik chain will work a little smoother. Most of time you don’t want the knee to bend backwards and there are limits to how far a person (or pineapple) can raise it’s leg forwards (no really, drink enough and you will see a pineapple try!) In grabbing the one leg’s goals I was not able to make the leg bend the way I would imagine you want it to. Depending on the viewport you do this in it can look like it’s bending correctly but it ended up looking like one of those sports clips with dislocated joints that makes you wince.
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