I'm using the sine deformer for basic fish swim motion. Starting with a large wavelength and decreasing it quickly gives the impression of acceleration. Very easy. But then you want the fish to slow back down to a cruise and things get tricky. But not impossible. So I have it working. My fish is accelerating and decelerating nicely. So I want to do it again. Have it do this action a little later in the time line. With the exact same wavelength animation, I get completely different results. My setup only works on the first iteration. That doesn't make any sense...unless there's something wrong with the sine deformer itself. So I checked. I referenced in my single acceleration/deceleration animation as a check. I shifted my reference animation to line up with the later acceleration/deceleration of my test scene. I templated the reference so that it's easy to compare. Here are the results.
I found an offset delta of -6 lines up the two files perfectly. Again, both animations are identical. I offset the time of my reference animation to line up the 2 setups. Now I advance to the next frame.
Sorry for switching the order of the channelBox images. Notice that everything is the same with the same delta of -6. Yet the deformations are different. And this is what it looks like 7 frames later.
So the logical question is, is there a slight offset in the underlying math that is causing this discrepancy? Does the sine deformer only work within a certain offset range? Will I have to find the magic modulus to have a repeatable animation? UGH!!!
