i've been thinking about an animation tool that would work like this:

- you model a spline
- the tool will treat the spline as if it would describe the trajectory of an animated object and create animation keys from that.

there are three parameters the tool would take additionally to the spline:

- stay time (s)
- ease in bias (i)
- ease out bias (o)

with the settings s=0, i=0.5, o=0.5, the tool would work just like the path constraint we have now (so maybe this could be an extension for the path constraint?).

with setting s=5, i=0.7, o=0.7, the tool would show about the effect you can see in the attached screenshot.

this could be used for many animation tasks, starting as simple as making a ball jump along a path with automatic easing, to more complex ones like creating the animations for a characters feet, etc. the manipulation of a path in the scene is very often much more easy to handle than editing in the keyframes window.

what do you think?

Sounds like the reverse of this tool:
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=14165

Smart paths.
Sounds very cool.


I've often wondered if there was any way I could define speed and/or change of oriention by the number of CPs on a spline... didn't know what I was talking about so moved on to other things.

How do CPs figure into all of this?
Or better yet how do you set the values on the spline?

Your 'Stepper' seems like a great way to be able to control the timeline *outside* of the timeline.

(Very interested!)
Rodney

the cps would be the basis for the steps.
so the in-bias would control how much the motion slows down/speeds up before reaching a cp, while the out-bias would do the same for moving away from a cp. the stay time would tell the tool how long to remain put AT a cp.

all things considered, its still very much the same as the path constraint, but it would give much more control to the user.

to luckbat: the path contraint that we have now is more like the inverse of a trajectory visualizer than this idea. the approach outlined above would allow the user much more "animation-oriented" workflow with paths.

Sounds like a great tool. There could be a library of splines that you could use again and again. It's basically the path constraint in the z axis also....and more control. I wonder if it could be adapted for skeletal mode as well as director mode.

Marcel, do you suppose there is any way to expand this into what dearmad was looking for?

Your proposal made me think of this from John Lasseter's well known paper on applying the Principles of Animation to 3D computer graphics. I realize his paper is coming up on 20 years old but I'm curious how Stepper fits (or doesn't fit) into his line of thinking.

- John Lasseter

Or have we just progressed so far past this that it no longer applies?