character rotates when using pose preset

gcwolfpost

Hey, I am not the best on the technical terms but I will try my best to explain my problem so someone can help me. I am pretty sure I know what the problem is, I am more asking the easiest way to fix it without remaking an entire animated scene from scratch.

Ok, I am making an animation and of course I divide the animation up into shorter animated scenes. At some point, I decided to add a new animated scene in between two exisiting scenes. This is easy for me to do. What made it a little more complex is sometimes the idea for a new scene will come to me and I will make the entire new scene and worry about having it flow seemlessly into the scene before and after the new scene later. Once I figured out "pose preset" this was also not too hard to do. Here is the problem. A BAD habit I have is I will rotate a character on one or more of the axis' not from the Hip selected but from the entire character selected. I have ALWAYS done it this way becuase I didn't know any better for a long time and it became a habit. I know I shouldn't but I just forget not to until the animation is done. As I often go long periods between making animations, it's very easy for me to forget. And since the problem only happens a small percentage of the time, laziness and habit tends to make me keep making the mistake.

So, I finish the new scene ( I will call the scene NEW SCENE 1) and obviously the start of NEW SCENE 1 does not match up with the end of the scene before it. This will cause a huge "Skip, Jump" in the characters postion from one scene to another, instead of it flowing into it when I animate it. So I make sort of a short "buffer" scene (called BUFFER SCENE) were I start a BUFFER SCENE with no animation in it from the last postion of the last scene I made from the original animation. Then I go to NEW SCENE 1, make a pose preset save for the character from the start of NEW SCENE 1. I go back to the Buffer SCENE, go 30 frames forward from the start and save the pose prest from NEW SCENE 1 at frame 30. This should make the buffer scene make a seemless animation from the original old scene's last frame directly into the first frame of NEW SCENE 1. And it does. Except for one problem.

I rotated the character on the "Z" axis in the original scene to get it into the postion I wanted. I did NOT rotate it from the hip but I rotated the entire character. So what is happening is in the BUFFER SCENE, the first frame matches perfecty with the last frame of the original animation. The last frame of the buffer scene matches perfectly with the first scene of NEW SCENE 1. But the dam character rotates all over the place on the "Z" axis in every frame in between the first and last frame. ARGH!!!!!!!! LOL.

Is there a way, to stop it from rotating all over the place between the first and last frame in the BUFFER SCENE? I could just remove the BUFFER SCENE and probably fudge something with camera angles and or "fades in and out" in blender to "mask" that the scenes that don't flow into each other seemlessly but I really would rather not.

I have not messed around with "nulls" hardly at all. But I was wondering would applying a "null" to the character in the buffer scene maybe fix this? And how would you even apply the null if it would? Again, thats a shot in the dark because I am not exactly sure what a null does. LOL.

Thanks

Richard Haseltine

One option would be to copy the transfiorms from the figure to the hip (or vice versa) at one end of the buffer scene, assuming that the hip was zeroed. Then zero the figure transforms, which should look the same but - because it is now using the same nodes - shouldn't give weird interpolated values.

gcwolfpost

Thanks alot Richard.