Reply To: Keyframes vs Curves
Good questions Nathi.
There are always more than 1 way to skin a cat…..although why people would want to do that to the poor cat is beyond me.
Sometimes less keyframes is better/easier and sometimes less keyframes is harder than it needs to be.
It really depends on the situation AND the animator (and to a lesser degree, the software).
Imagine this curve below…..(it’s not to scale and I have just quickly sketched this out so it’s not 100% accurate but hopefully it illustrates the point)
An animator could place keyframes at each one of the blue marks.
Or at the orange marks
Or a combination of both.
The result is the same so which is better?
The way that got you to the end result the quickest and easiest.
(This will be different for everybody)
When I was a younger animator, I used to use as minimal keyframes as possible. And adjust the handles on everything to make it all flow nicely together the way that I wanted. My animation was alright, but it took longer than it needed to.
These days I use more keyframes in the spots where I know I don’t want to be messing about with the curves and I can just tell the software what to do.
And I use less keyframes where I know the software is probably going to do what I want automatically – or only require small tweaks.
Work Smarter not Harder.
In your example that doesn’t have the keyframe at the top of the arc. That is certainly possible. But that’s only something I do on the really small bounces.
For me, it’s easier to have that orange keyframe there – and that way if you need to adjust it, that is what you adjust. The other side handles are easy because I know what shape the curve should be (I’ve seen a lot of animation spaghetti)
As for the X loc in your example – I would start out the way you suggest, but then I keyframe the contacts and make the connections vector to straighten them out while the ball is in the air.
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Hope that helps you think about your workflow.