Little_fellaX docs - page 05
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Soooo animation.. mmh, scary, not to much experience there... o well, here goes:
By the way, for a lot of people with a little or a lot of experience, this will be boring and not always the correct way to do this, but there are newbies who like to learn the basics as well. At least, that's what I assume.
To animate something in whatever 3D (or 2D) package you use, you set keyframes along a timeline for whatever it is you are animating, and the program interpolates all the steps to go from one state of transformation (the first keyframe) to the next (the other keyframe). These keyframes are represented by dots on a timeline in the action window. Click on the image below for a larger view.
Wow, quite messy right? Don't worry, there's a lot of useless keyframes in there.
To make a keyframe, select the item, or bone you want to key, and press the "I" key. a menu will popup where you can choose which properties to set a key for.
it this particular case I would have set keys for the hands and the head, and these would have been keys for all the locations, rotations and scale (meaning in both the x, y and z axis) That's what LocRotScale stands for. Since I only moved and rotated these bones, I would have been better off using a LocRot (only location and rotation keys would have been set). In this particular case, I have also moved the upperbody bone, the eyetarget and the jaw. Since I didn't set keys for these bones, they will jump back to their original place if I start to animate.
Not the best way of animating, but suppose you want to be certain you don't forget any bones, you can select them all once you've posed them, and press I to give them all keys. Choose locrotscale to make sure you have covered all the transformations. Then skip ahead for say, 10 frames (press the up arrow to advance 10 frames, press the rightarrow to advance one frame), set a new pose, select all, and press I again to insert keyframes for that pose. This will leave you with a lot of keyframes you potentially don't need, but if you're new to this, it prevents you from messing up poses easily.
A better tutorial about animation can be found here. I'm still just playing around with animation enough. I'll update this page once I have a more in-detail tutorial. The animation techniques found at the link mentioned can easily be applied to this rig as well. the walkcycle tutorial can mostly be copied. There are some differences in the little_fella foot setup, but you shouldn't have much trouble adapting these techniques.
Just a quick hint, if you want to move your character around in a way which requires him to lift his leg, it can be a n33t trick to first key the starting and end positions, and then at the center of the motion, tweak the upperbody and lift the leg up (and move whatever other bones you like) and key everything again (or better yet, only key the ones you moved).
ONE more thing: in the action editor, you can still use the "A" and "B" shortcuts to select and deselect stuff. But suppose you want to select all the keyframes that are on the same frame (same point in time) well, select one of em and press "K". this will select all the keyframes that are on the same frame.
For now, happy blending!