From the course: Learning Cinema 4D Lite for After Effects
Keyframe interpolation
From the course: Learning Cinema 4D Lite for After Effects
Keyframe interpolation
Now as I said earlier, there are two different modes for the timeline in CINEMA 4D, and we're going to have a look at those here. If you want to follow along, you can open chapter_04_03.c4d. And down in the timeline, you'll see I have some rotation here on the head of my robot. Now, if I go here to my project settings, which I can get to by clicking on this little black arrow, then I can get to key interpolation settings. And you'll see that the default value is to have interpolation explain interpolation. So it's using Splines to animate between the points. I prefer to work with linear interpolation, and I showed you how to set that up in the preferences. But, I just want to show you how you can change that, if you've already started a project and you've used spline interpolation. Spline interpolation is lovely, because, when we play this back, and I'm just going to hit the Play button, you can see we get a nice smooth transition from one rotation value to the other. And if we view the curves that are used, the F curves, by clicking on this button here to switch to F curve mode and select the rotation value, you'll see what it does, it creates these nice curves for our animation. So we get a nice smooth transition between one rotation value and another. And that's the default animation type same as After Effect. It defaults to what After Effects calls bezier interpolation, and what's called spline interpolation here in CINEMA 4D. So, if we go back to our project settings again, hitting the up high root till we get to them. You can default to use linear. And because we're animating a robot, I really think that we're better using linear interpolation. so we get a more jagged animation rather than a kind of very smooth animation. We may leave the head of the robot as that, but let's switch to linear and let's animate something else. So, let's go to linear animation and then let's select the chest. We want to animate the chest. We may want to figure out what we want to animate, so let's just do a little scrub there. And I think that value is what we want to animate the pitch value. So we're going to animate the pitch value. So with the time marker moved back to the beginning, let's hold down the Ctrl key and click on the rotation pitch value to create a keyframe there. Now, you'll notice that we have the chest appearing down in the timeline now. And underneath that, we have the Rotation value. And if I select that, you can't actually see the keyframe. Now, this is a bit confusing, and it often catches our After Effects users. But if we switch back to Key mode, you should see now a keyframe. The reason you don't see anything in F curve mode is because we haven't got curve in there yet. Until we have two keyframes, we can't see a curve. Now, as you can see, it's handy to be able to jump between keyframe mode and F curve mode. So Spacebar allows you to do that. So, just quickly jumping between the modes. So let's move ahead and well move maybe to the 30 frame mark. And what we're going to do is create our second keyframe. Okay. So to set our second key frame, we come up here, but you'll notice the track rotation P properties are now showing. So, because it's a context sensitive manager that we're using up here, the Attributes Manager, you'll see it's updated to show us the properties for that keyframe. So, it's telling us velocity settings and curve settings for the keyframe. So if we want to get back to the object itself, we can click the up arrow until we get back to the cylinder object chest value. And all we need to do is just choose the second value. So let's go back first, and then we'll set keyframe by holding down Ctrl and clicking. We'll move forwards to 60, and then we're going to bring that forwards as if he's tilting forwards. And set keyframe by holding down Ctrl and clicking. So we now have him moving backwards and forwards as he turns his head. So, now let's go back to F-curve mode. And now you can see, we have a curve. But because I set my settings to linear, you'll see, we can now see a linear interpolation displayed. Rather than this one, which was a curved interpolation. Now, you'll notice my graph is being cut off there. If I want to see it all, I can go to Frame > Frame All, and that will show me the entire animation. There are also buttons up here, you can see Frame Selected, Frame All buttons are here, so you can use those buttons to do exactly the same thing. So that's a little bit about key frame interpolation in CINEMA 4D Lite.
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Contents
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Understanding coordinates5m
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Understanding rotation2m 39s
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Timeline shortcuts3m 1s
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Basic keyframing of properties4m 31s
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Copying keyframes2m 3s
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Keyframe interpolation5m 20s
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Adjusting F-Curves5m 45s
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Holding values5m 8s
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Using XPresso to link properties: Part one4m 17s
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Using XPresso to link properties: Part two2m 27s
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Importing existing animations into CINEMA 4D Lite7m 34s
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Animating cameras in CINEMA 4D Lite4m 37s
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Animating using presets4m 32s
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