Victor Navone Spline Tutorials

VC325 - 3D Computer Animation

This tutorial hit on many terms, described the spline-based workflow, and described the do’s and dont’s when it comes to animating.
The tutorial is started of with the basics describing if a spline is ascending that means that the value is increasing and the ball is moving to the right. And if the spline is descending that means the value is decreasing. It also explained on the graph editor that a change in the direction of the slope means a change in the object’s direction. They also gave heads up that tangent handles behave similar like Adobe Illustrator bezier paths. Lastly they state that when you start out animation it is best to start with flat tangents.

Ease-In’s & Ease-Out’s:
When it comes to keys/tangents the amount to move and tilt a key for an ease depends on a lot of things: the distance between the two poses, the weight and size of the object, the intensity of the action, and the style of animation. When something is easing-in, it is stopping at a slower pace and when something is easing-out, it is starting at a much slower pace.

Fast-In & Out’s:
To get a fast-in or fast-out  you do not need to change the value of any key. You can either change the keys to be linear, break the tangent handles, or shorten them until they cease to affect the shape of the spline. For Fast-Out, Ease-In: there is no acceleration in the spacing only deceleration because the ball is moving fastest right after it has been hit, and from there it only decelerate. For Ease-Out, Fast-In: there is deceleration or whatever is being animated will continue rolling until an immovable object stopped it.

Anticipation & Overshoot:
Simple version for making an object feel alive. And NEVER combine the two together.
The second part of the tutorial starts off by describing specific tips and advice that will help you create much cleaner animation.

Smoothness: The tangent rotated so that the splines pass smoothly thorugh the keys.
Curve Containment: For a curve containment, you should let the keys describe you extremes, not your curves and try to keep the spline handles from overshooting other keys in time.
Economy of Key: This section is about deleting unneccesary keys that you do not need and also it will make your splines look cleaner and easier to edit.
Variation: Another good tip they give is your graph editor looks repetitive then your animation will appear repetitive so what you can do is make a change in your value, timing, and tangents.

Easy Eases: You can easily use tangent handles to describe your action instead of adding a lot of keys; this speed workflow.

Easy Overlap: Adding overlapping actions to things like tails, har and even the spine can be tedious but it’s necessary to show weight.

Lastly the tutorial covered the Spline-Based workflow. In this workflow, they talk about how to convert your the stepped curves to spines. The best thing to do is to convert all your keys to flat tangents and from there you can determine yourself which tangent handles should be smoothed. Most of your time is devoted in the last step where you have to smooth out the roots.