Reply To: Keyframes vs Curves

[Phil Osterbauer]

Hi Nathi,
That’s a really good question and I think its something quite common to think of when working with these foundational exercises. I’ve once seen someone just plug an equation in on the rotational transform for the rolling ball exercise. This all works, its working smarter not harder right? But when you start getting into more complicated exercises like pantomime shot, acting shot or anything that combines 2 or more actions. You will start seeing, the more you rely on the computer doing all the tweening there is a swimmyness or a very transitional flow to the action that the audience will feel and animators will see. You can see it a lot in tv animation, because of the fast rate of production. Animators have not time to support all the key poses with tween poses. If you frame by frame you can literally see many shots are just sliding from pose to pose. And by no means will I tell you, you need to have a pose each frame and DOWN WITH THE COMPUTER to handle tweens. But you’ll find when you are under the situation; You have a character doing this full body action with 30, 40….100 controls all firing at once and then you realize the timing feels off. You need to slide everything back a few frames. You’ll be wishing that you had the keyed pose to slide around over a stretched fcurve. 
“Everything is a bouncing ball.” and the ball in this case is teaching you how to see and lock in those golden moments of action. 
I hope this helps, happy animating!