Is there an easier way to get smooth animation curves when looping an animation.

[Anonymous]

I've recently been working on walk cycles for a game and I ran into a problem where I couldn't easily set the tangents of the first and last keyframes of the animation. Even with pre-infinity cycle and post-infinity cycle both activated, the first and last keyframes would either make their tangents horizontal (auto), or would only align themselves with regard to the single keyframe next to them - the first one would point straight at the keyframe right after it, and the last keyframe of the animation would point itself straight at the keyframe just before it, making the two tangents different even though they are supposed to loop leading to awkward blending from end to beginning.

To solve this I "manually" looped the animation, meaning that I copied keyframes from inside the time-slider and placed them in "infinity". This forces the first and last frames to not only take into account the frame next to them that was inside the time slider, but also the frame that lies outside the time slider. These manually looped curves - by placing keyframes outside of the time slider - create smooth identical tangents for the first and last keys of my walk cycle. The problem is that they're a total pain in the neck. If I change any part of the walk cycle within the time slider (frames 1-36/37 - the only frames I'm going to export) then I have to make sure I copy those keyframes and paste them in my pre and post infinities in order to get accurate curves during the loop back to frame 1.

So, I was wondering if there was an automatic way, or an easier way to get smooth looping on animation curves in the graph editor. I've seen a lot of people manually go through their curves and set their tangents to avoid bad looking deceleration/acceleration across the looping keyframes, and I'm hoping there's an easier way.

Thanks in advance for any tips and tricks to make it easier. Feel free to let me know your technique to get nice looking curves from your last frame to your first frame of a looping animation.

Cheers.

P.S. if anyone needs pictures of my curves for clarification please let me know and I'll post some.