Animation Help: Object Rotation without pauses

[Jojon]

Speaking of curves, I think I'll drop in this little Blender script (again) here...

If anybody plans to make animations with any precision, they may find it useful.

Something, either in the way PyPRP exports curves, or how Plasma handles them, makes it necessary to adhere to a restriction in how the IPO curves are constructed, if the animation in-game is to exactly match what you see in Blender.

Specifically: On the X axis, curve handles must be equidistant between points. This means that you have no real control over on the weight of the handle vectors, only their directions - the weight becomes a resultant of the direction and the distance to the neighbouring point.

The attached script appears under Blender's scripts/animation menu and will automatically space point handles evenly, for all selected objecs. (a one-shot action -- if you add points afterwards, you'll have to run it again)
When editing the curves, after running the script; Use the "Y" key to restrict motion to the Y axis.

Note that the script does not bother with attempting to preserve curve shapes, due to the lost ability to define weight, mentioned above, so curves may look very different after running it (they will look the way they would act in URU, if exported either before or after running the script).
(I may add preservation of direction, at some point, after all, since the weight influence may be negligible in most cases...)


EDIT: Oops, I guess it's not ok to attach plain ASCII files, or something - the .rar archive seems to have made it through, though...

[andylegate]

Hey I noticed that you guys figured this out, but thought I would add some visuals to this. I was having the same problem in Max (a 360 deg looping animation that would stop and start again), and the answer is the same to both, after I looked at one of Cyan's max files.

For Blender Users:

I've found that Blender doesn't like the 360 animation, the curve is non-existent, so what I do is set a 180 deg halfway key. Once you have set the frames for you animated object, take a look at the IPO curve:



As you can see you have a falloff at the beginning and end of the animation. The trick is to make this line straight.
So select all the keys on your curve, then in the menu click on Curve >Interpolation Mode > Linier



This will remove the falloff on your curve, and your animation will no longer have a slow start, or stop, but will instead start rotating and keeping going:



For Max Users: You can use only 2 markers for a full 360 deg rotation in Max, however, you will end up with the same falloff problem. Open up the Graphic Curve Editor and take a look:



To fix this, select your markers and then click on the button that looks like a straight line, and your falloffs will go away:



Here's a video of the 360 deg rotation animation looping correctly:

http://youtu.be/uX9FGhceIdk

I guess I should add this to my tutorials.

[pojibonzai]

Thanks for the info! Your tutorials are very much appreciated.

Hey I noticed that you guys figured this out, but thought I would add some visuals to this. I was having the same problem in Max (a 360 deg looping animation that would stop and start again), and the answer is the same to both, after I looked at one of Cyan's max files.

Where does one find Cyan's Max files?

[roy1932]

Andy Legate, I have typed that name in quite a few times, with the help of nanoukmetal, and now I find that i cannot find you any more,except on this page, to download the Flymode patch for Uru. I have spent hours in quite a few pages, nothing. what has happened to it?. I would be grateful for any advise you could give me as this item was in my opinion the best thing that You ever did for the game. I wish you every success, and thanks.Roy