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  • Published 12 Jul 2019

Velocity curves option for graph editor

Often times when I find myself wanting to edit animation curves in the graph editor, but running into a problem where if an object is animated along two axis at once, the curves can be very finicky and not produce the indeed straight line.

EX: I want a camera to move up and to the left at the same time in a straight line, but I want it to have custom easing. If the curves aren't perfectly tweaked, then the camera will move in a curved path instead of straight.

In After effects there is a feature called "Velocity Curves," along side normal curves, which look a bit then what most people are used to but specifically lets the user control the velocity between two key-frames, instead of the position like normal curves do. It also handles keyframes "As a whole," instead of separating them by Axis, so it makes the above mentioned problem disappear.

On the technical side it seems like this wouldn't be too involved to do as nothing new would need to be saved. All the velocity information is already there and just needs to be calculated based on the current curve then is displayed in the new tab. Once the velocity is edited, that information could then just be saved back to the original curves.

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Development Status: Open

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zhixson.xbdi
12 Jul 2019

5 Comments

CheesecakeCG

The lack of this feature is the soul reason I haven't put much time in to animation, it's just needlessly hard.

zhixson.xbdi Author

* @Chris D * To be fair, I found that using the "Normalized curves," option makes this much easier. Still not as great as velocity curves, but it works for the time being.

jason

It would probably be wise to include mock-ups that show how you envision this looking and working in the Blender interface.

crumpley

Lightwave3D used to have an option in it's graph editor for displaying velocity or speed as a curve relative to the anim curves you were displaying. It gave you a nice guide for smoothing out paths and showed you were your motion was abrupt, etc. I think at least displaying a speed curve would be fairly easy. Not sure how you would allow for editing the speed curve and having it update multiple axes keyframe values. Sounds exotic.

Vyach

* @Stephen Bailey * so it is more like acceleration analysis