sub-frame motion path accuracy

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

The Smoother KF Assistant often comes in handy after a Motion Sketch routine. Ensure that you select the KFs that you want to smooth. This will enable the Smoother’s UI. Set Tolerance to a high value for smoother results. The number of KFs will be reduced and the path will be smoother as a result of applying Smoother.

HTH
RoRK

Intensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer

[Darby Edelen]

There’s also a fairly straightforward smooth() expression function. If you apply it exactly as I’ve written it above then you should get a smoother result out of the box.

If you need to adjust the smoothing then there are a couple of simple parameters you can change. The first is the ‘width’ of the smoothing which defines the amount of time around the current frame to use for the smooth, the default is 0.2 seconds. The second is the number of samples to take across this width/duration, you should usually use an odd number here so that a sample falls on the current frame, the default is 5 samples.

So, if you want less stair-stepping in the keyframe interpolation you can increase the samples, and if you want the curve to match the original path more closely you can decrease the width:

smooth(0.1, 17);

I’d recommend changing the values while you look at the temporal graph of the expression.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Also, the emitter position in Particular has a few different options under Position Subframe. I’d recommend 10x Linear if you’re seeing ugly linear bits in your emitter path. This has the effect of smoothing the emitter’s motion path and may do the job without any additional smoothing via the smoother or an expression.

Darby Edelen

[Nick Hill]

Thanks all. I wasn’t aware of the position subframe options (hidden in plain view??) but that’s actually pretty much exactly what I was thinking of.

Cheers

Nick