Animation breaks after switching from stepped to spline in graph editor.

[catanescuionel]

Hi people.

I was wondering if someone could help with this one.

So I have this problem when trying to animate this panther, long story short, I never tried to animate anything in maya until now because first I learned to model stuff and to build rigs, so I did that and now I need to learn how to use tools in maya to animate characters, animals etc. Now I know how things are supposed to move in real life, but I am having hard times making my cat move the way she should moves as long as after converting my curves from stepped into splines, the animation breaks, it behaves in a way that I do not expect, even if I try to go in and try to fix it, still not manage to do it the way I want, and if I add more keys it makes my animation looks like it has some kind of lag.

Obviously I am doing something wrong, but I don't know what I am doing wrong, I tried to add more in-between keys in the blocking process as well as after converting into spline.

I am really out of ideas at this point, so I would really appreciate any help.

Thanks in advance ! Peace.

[hamsterHamster · Accepted solution]

Releasing stepped to spline/auto/plateau will require keying every control every time you set keyframe, otherwise the interpolations are unpredictable.

See the frame from your graph ed:

For the every question mark, ask yourself a question: "how would I tell Maya what value should be there?"

By keying.

[catanescuionel]

Ok, I will try that see if I understand that right.

One question before, I watched a course about animating a scene in maya, there was this character doing a swing on a pipe and then landing on a platform, the guy went blocking all the main poses first, and when he convert everything in spline, the animation looks almost perfect, he just made some adjusments, a few in-betweens and that was it, like, why he didn't get the same mess I got?

[hamsterHamster]

I bet, he was setting the keys on every control, not just on those he just altered.

[catanescuionel]

He actually did that, hmm, it kinda makes more sens for me now, 'cuz I keyed only that controls.

Well I'll try the thing you mentioned, hope I make it work.

Anyway thanks a lot for the help, I appreciate it ! 

Peace ! 😎✌️

[stephaniebellgardt]

Personally I always work in spline, I almost never use stepped mode for that reason. I like that I get a result closer to the final animation from the very beginning, rather than the choppy motion of stepped keys.