Post-tutorial wall bounce amendments

Following Jon's (very helpful) critique on Friday I amended my first wall jump exercise!

We both agreed that my ball hit the peak of its stretch on the drop a little too early, and he also pointed out that my ball remained in the squashed position once it began the jump, which looked a bit weird — it needed to stretch as soon as it left the ground. There was a similar issue with the landing — the ball squashed before it even hit the ground.

My first amendment was better, but the ball was still stretched on the drop a little too early, and Jon commented that he felt the drop itself was perhaps a bit slow. I do think that the speed of the jump and fall is a little too uniform, so on my next amendment I made an attempt to speed it up slightly by reducing the number of frames between the highest and lowest points and slightly altering the fcurve.

The faster speed seems better to me, but I think the stretch is still too early! It also seems to me like the ball comes down a little too quickly — I may try increasing the ball's delay at the peak of its jump, or just slow down the beginning of the drop a little.

I also went back and tried to correct the same squashing/stretching issues in my other bounce, the one with multiple jumps:

Something still seems at odds to me about this one, but I'm not quite sure what it is exactly. I think that maybe the ball hangs in the air a little too long on the first (and smallest) bounce, or maybe that it doesn't hold its initial downwards/preparatory squash long enough. The ball's squashes on each impact with the ground are also quite quick/sudden, so maybe I need to look at holding the squashes on-screen for just a little bit longer?

Softimage - interpolation experimentation V2

A slightly more complex experimentation this time. I wanted to try and have the ball move in a semi-realistic fashion down a steep slope, rolling along the bottom of the curve and up the other side. Almost like a skate ramp - the ball would of course lose momentum as it begins the steep climb, so it probably wouldn't quite make it to the top before it rolls back down again.

Maybe viewing the video will make more sense...!

Looking a little shoddy thus far, but I think I can tweak it to fix it up a little. I cheated a little on animating the ball itself, but seeing as this is mostly an fcurve exercise I think I can get away with it! I drew the path using the bezier knot tool as described in one of my earlier posts. I tried to keep the angle of the slopes relatively consistent so that it would have an equal distance to travel on both sides. I then just set the curve I'd drawn as the ball's motion path by selecting the ball and using Create > Path > Set Path. The ball then locked itself to the first bezier knot point and the animation is automatically set to follow the path using a splined interpolation - a relatively lifeless speed and not at all realistic. 

Opening the animation editor reveals that the ball's speed and motion is controlled by fcurves! (I didn't screenshot it, sorry!) So I set to work tweaking and messing around with it.

The curves for this one are a little convulted, but I'll do my best to try and explain them...

The first thing I did was activate the animation ghosting for the ball so I could get a clearer picture of how my timing was without needing to play it back every time. This allowed me to much more accurately tweak my curves as I was able to see immediately after adjusting them how it would effect the animation.

Originally, the ball was a little too 'sharp' on the curve at the bottom. It followed the shape almost exactly so I needed to round it out a little bit so it didn't jump too sharply on the corner. I simply added a couple of keyframes either side of the lowest position at the bottom of the path and dropped the Y position a little, so that it remained on the bottom of the curve a little longer.

Starting from the first keyframe, I wanted it to slowly accelerate out of the highest point and pick up speed as it dropped down the slope, hence the sudden spike in the curve. I wanted it to keep a continuous speed as it turned the corner and uses the energy gathered from the sharp drop to propel itself up the other side. Gravity would be pulling down on the ball all the while, causing it to gradually drop in speed as it nears the top of the slope, eventually pulling it back down and causing it to roll back up the other side.

There's a very wide curve on the top keyframe that keeps the ball at its current level before gradually beginning its descent which rapidly escalates into a steep drop, increasing the speed of the ball. 

I think that I've sort of got the effect I was going for - it's getting there, at least. I think that the ball probably hangs in the air too long at either side of the curve, so I need to reduce the width of that curve so that it drops a little sooner. This might also allow me more time to adjust the acceleration so that the increase in speed is a little more gradual. I think that it gets too fast too soon as it falls from the right side. Conversely, I think it's too slow in picking up speed on the initial drop from the left side - simply shifting the width of the curve so that it's a little more equal on both sides should rectify that.

I also think that it stops too suddenly as it returns to the starting position, almost as if it's hitting an invisible ceiling. I'd like to add a little overshoot to that, so that it flies up a little further before dropping back down. Tweaking the curve so that it extends slightly below the final keyframe should give me that result.

Hopefully that all makes sense...!

Softimage - fcurve interpolation types

In an attempt to better understand the fcurve editor, I'm going to be doing some far more basic examples of how the curves effect the timing/speed. To start with, looking at Softimage's preset interpolation types:

The three balls all have keyframes set at the same points. Although they reach the start and end points at exactly the same time, the way in which they reach those points is very different. In other words, the speed is the same, but the timing is different.

The first ball uses the default "spline" interpolation. Each keyframe will be connected by a smooth curve or "spline" (tried looking up what a spline actually is, but it made my brain hurt), eases into or out of each keyframe, creating very smooth and organic animation.

The curve shows how the ball gradually accelerates out of the starting position, then gradually slows into the second keyframe (the highest point on the graph represents the furthest distance travelled). It then slows out of that pose and comes back in the opposite direction, easing back into the starting position.

The second ball uses the "linear" interpolation type, which as the name suggests is a constant rate of motion with no "cushioning." Objects with a linear interpolation will have their keyframes connected by straight lines, terminating in sharp points at each keyframe, representing a constant speed and sudden changes at each into and out of each keyframe. The result is very mechanical and robotic, potentially useful in animating cameras or lights where such organic motion as offered by spline interpolation isn't always needed.

This ball's rate of motion is steady and unchanging. It starts and ends at exactly the same speed with no acceleration at all. The change of direction is very sudden and sharp with no cushioning from one keyframe to the next.

The last ball uses a "constant" or "stepped" interpolation which keeps the keyframe's current values (position, rotation etc) stationary until the point of change, at which point it will "pop" or "snap" straight to the next one with no in-between movement. This is primarily useful for blocking out the keyframes of an animation without any pesky inbetweens, making it easier to check that the flow from pose to pose is correct. It could also be useful for camera or lighting cuts!

You can see from the graph that the ball's x position remains at the same level until frame 25, where it suddenly snaps upwards to the far right of the screen (highest point on the graph). Again, it remains in this position until frame 25, where it suddenly pops back to the lowest point on the graph - the starting position.

It's mostly the spline interpolation I'm interested in at this point. I certainly understand the principle of how it works, I think it's just going to take a lot more practice to get my brain used to interpreting the curves as speed and movement. I'm going to use the same setup as above - three balls moving at the same rate - but altering the fcurve for each one so that I can better compare the results and, hopefully, start to understand how certain timings "look" as a curve.

Fcurve experimentation - ramp roll V1

Setting myself a couple of little exercises to try and get to grips with Softimage's keyframes and fcurve editor. I decided to try what I thought would be a fairly simple task - get a ball rolling down a ramp before slowing to a halt. It was trickier than I thought.

I didn't know of any better way to get the ball to roll down the ramp other than to manually keyframe it every few frames to ensure it stuck to the surface of the ramp - if left to its down devices, Softimage would have simply allowed the ball to take the most direct route to the next keyframe - levitating the ball away from the ramp, or cutting straight through it, etc. This caused a few problems with the fcurve editor as each new keyframe places a new point on the curve, so adjusting the angle became a case of having to ensure that the curve ran continuously through each point. That meant a lot of handle adjusting and balancing.

It's looking really dodgy so far. I had trouble figuring out how to get the ball to accelerate on the ramp and slow to a stop at the end - it sort of does that, but it stops far too suddenly and the ball speeds up upon exiting the ramp. It should be easy enough to fix, once I've played with the curves a little more.

Wall bounce homework V2, take 3

Added some more bounces towards the end as the ball loses its energy, also tweaked the fcurves in a similar fashion to the last exercise to give the impression that the ball is throwing itself upwards with more force with each successive bounce.

I'd foolishly only been viewing it in RT playback whilst I was tweaking the curves, so now seeing it at true speed in an external video player has flagged up a lot of issues with the timing. Looks to me like the ball hangs in the air just a bit too long and it drops a bit too slowly as well. I could either re-adjust the overall timing using a region, as before, or I could slightly alter the fcurves to rectify this. I'll probably experiment both ways and see what happens!

Just for added excitement, here's a quick snap of what my curves for the y position looked like:

Looking at the curves I can definitely see that the ball lags too long on the first bounce. It's a very wide curve, so I'll shrink that one down just a bit and see about adjusting the slope of the ball's descents from each jump.

Wall bounce homework V2

Similar to the last exercise but this time I wanted the ball to execute four consecutive jumps in its attempt to get over the wall.

Timing's a bit shoddy so far - these are literally just keyframes on the postion/scale parameters. I think the last two jumps are okay but the first two look off to me. I think it needs to bounce just a little higher on the first jump, or at least reach its current point a little sooner. I think there's too big a change in maximum height reached between the first and second jumps so that there's not really the feeling of successive power being built up. I need to alter the points at which it reaches its maximum stretch on rising and falling as well.

I'm also thinking of adding a set of successively smaller bounces after the final jump as it comes to a rest and loses energy. Should have done that first really!

Wall jump homework V1, take 2

I've dived once more into the terrifying waters of the fcurve editor and emerged very wet, very cold, and not necessarily any braver for it!

I attempted to alter the function curves to add a little more personality to the ball's jump, as well as re-timing a few of the keyframes using the dope sheet, in accordance with the changes made by the fcurve editor.

It took me a fair bit of tinkering to figure out how to alter the curves to best effect, but I think I finally have something fairly decent:

The overall result gives the impression of a ball leaping into the air to catch a glimpse over a very high wall.

The first thing I did was speed the whole thing up by using the dope sheet's "region select" tool to squash all the keyframes together a little more.

With the tool selected, simply drag a selection over the keyframes you want to re-time.

Then, holding shift, drag the handles on either side of the region and drag left or right to reposition/re-time all the selected keyframes. I think you can actually reverse keyframes using this tool as well, if you drag the region far enough in the opposite direction!

I reduced the overall duration of the animation from 41 frames to about 35; the result is just slightly faster but it adds a little more energy to the ball's bounce.

Once I was happy with the timing I switched over to the fcurves editor to alter the speed/timing of the ball's jump by adjusting the slope of the y axis' curve. By selecting "isolate curve" under the view menu you can temporarily hide out all the other curves and view only the curves of the selected parameters. Probably not necessary in this case but is tremendously useful if you have a more complex animation with a lot of curves all over the place.

I didn't get screencaps of all my curve alterations (there must have been at least 50 billion) but this was the one I ended up with. 

The large, sweeping arc at the top represents the ball's delay at the peak of the movement. it moves gradually more slowly as it reaches the height of the jump and remains relatively airborne for a few frames before gradually beginning its descent, picking up speed as it nears the ground.

Huh. Typing that out made much more sense than it did as I was trying to understand it in my head.

It's kind of embarrassing how long it took me to figure it out; it's a relatively simple idea and I mostly understand the principle of it, I think it's just a bit deceptively mathematical and my brain is having trouble getting to grips with it. I find that I'm having massive trouble reading these curves and graphs as speed and timing - my brain just won't process it. I think I've managed to whittle it down to a basic understanding of "the steeper the slope, the faster the movement," but when I start thinking about inverted curves I start to get confused again. 

I'm hoping that it will start to get easier and more natural with practice. I've never been mathematically gifted and anything vaguely resembling numbers tends to frazzle my brain more than I care to admit.

Anyway! I then went back to the dope sheet and altered some keyframes in accordance with the new timing of the ball's ascent and descent. I shifted the stretch poses as it rose and dropped a little further along, so that they would reach the peak of their stretch at a slightly later point (giving them enough time to squash into the next pose without appearing too sudden), as well as off-setting the squash at the top of the movement so that it occurred one frame later. The result was a tiny bit of overlap as the ball reaches the height of its jump and the bottom continues upwards to catch up, 'squashing' it at the top of the movement.

I'm still not at all comfortable with my use and understanding of the fcurves. I'm going to start a few more tests and try to get some different results - applying the curves to a variety of personalities/types of bounce etc. should hopefully give me more of an idea as to how the angle and slope of the curves effects the animation.

Slide homework V3, take 5

And here it is with tweaked timing on the roll across the table. I have nothing else to say about it, other than the fact that this is the angle it looks best at. Viewing it from the front reveals how terrible the rebound off the ring is! So I'm cheating and covering it up.

Slide homework V3, take 4

Still messing around with this one, trying to get that recoil off the ring just right. It's trickier than I thought!

   

It's kind of random, but I ended up looking at the above video for an idea as to how the ball might react on collision with a solid object. It looks like it actually keeps spinning in pretty much the same direction, so I tried to emulate that in the animation:

I'm still finding it quite difficult to get the timing on the rebound just right - the ball always seems to delay right before changing direction and no matter what I do, I can't seem to fix it. This was my best attempt. I guess I'm not quite getting the hang of manipulating keyframes! I did manage to reduce the delay slightly but that caused the ball to shoot off way too fast which I wasn't able to easily fix, given the relatively small amount of frames between the ball's position at the ring and the edge of the table.

I sped up the exit from the slide/entry to the table a bit but now, looking at it, it seems way too fast - a very sudden change in speed from the ball's descent down the slide. I'm going to tweak that once more to try and get a more consistent speed and then call it a day. 

I'm actually a bit more pleased with the rotation of the ball now, though - I had it change direction on the drop to the floor as it bounces away and it seems to have worked fairly nicely. One small success!

Slide homework V3, take 3

Made a brave attempt at altering some of the timings. Most notably the ball drops with significantly more weight than before - it certainly looks more like it's dropping rather than floating! I also attempted some timing adjustments on the exit from the slide, making it a little faster as it flies out the end and hits the table. I'm still not at all happy with the change in direction after hitting the ring - the physics feel totally off to me. I don't even have anything remotely ball-shaped to reference, and clips on Youtube are only so much help!

I've made some minor adjustments to the ball's bounces as it hits the floor as well, manually tweaking a few frames to give a slightly smoother arc. I've sped up each successive drop as well and brought the smaller bounces a little closer together to help give the idea that it's losing energy.

I can't quite seem to put my finger on why the recoil off the ring looks so off. It would certainly help if I had something to reference. I've got a slight feeling it might just be that the change in direction isn't quite sudden enough. It looks as if the ball hits the ring with a fair bit of speed, so it should probably fly off in the other direction a little more suddenly. Think I'm going to have to keep playing around with it.

I have actually added some rotation to the ball as well, but you can't see it owing to a lack of pattern or texture. I captured a version with the wireframe visible so you can actually see the rotation:

I actually prefer it without the rotation if I'm being honest - I think it's a bit distracting, but that might be because the rotation doesn't make any sense. I have absolutely no idea how colliding with the ring would effect (or is it affect?) the rotation of the ball, and as I said I've got nothing to reference. I went with my best guess and tried to just have it change direction to roll in the direction it's moving but that looks pretty clearly wrong to me.

I'd like to try adding a nicer rotation to the drop and bounce, as well as have it slightly teeter over the edge of the table just before it drops. I think in order for that to work I'd need to have a gradual deceleration after it hits the ring, so it approaches the edge a little more slowly.

But hey, it seems to be shaping up at least! 

Slide homework V3

Here's a little progress on my third attempt at the slide task. It's not yet complete but I figured I'd take a breather and just talk a bit about what I've come up with so far and how the approach I've taken has been working out. These sort of half-finished progression posts are quite helpful I find!

So, this time I sat down and thought about it much more carefully, spending some time plotting out the path and action that my ball would take. I ran through the sequence at different speeds in my head and on paper, timing myself using a stopwatch and taking a very loose average of the timing that worked best. I plotted the rough keyframes on this sophisticated and totally accurate diagram: 

Using the chart as reference I was able to copy the keyframes over to the 3D counterpart, which really helped me to get to grips with the timing. I also took a brave stab at timing/spacing charts which you can see dotted all over the page - though certainly far from an industry standard I feel that taking the time to have a go at them myself really improved my understanding of how they worked. I've read lots about thinking in rhythms and spacing and beats but I just didn't really understand how to apply any of it. I think it's one of those things that, no matter how many books you read on the subject, you actually have to give it a go before the penny finally drops. 

I hope that made sense.

Anyway, though the resulting animation probably doesn't look too much different, the process and workflow of actually creating it was more logical and far more straightforward. A little forward planning really does make such a monumental difference - and a far less stressful experience.

It's not quite complete yet, as you can see. I still need to tweak a little of the timing as the ball exits the slide - I kind of feel that its entry to the table is a little too slow. I think it could stand to be a bit faster so that the impact with the ring causing it to roll off the table makes more sense.

Aside from that, I had a crack at giving the balls a little more weight and personality by squashing the red one as it pulls back and stretching it as it lunges forward, to give it a bit of strength. I think the impact of the peg with the blue ball has a little more kick as a result! I'm relatively satisfied with the path of the ball down the slide itself, aside from the aforementioned speed issue.

The next major thing is to get the ball to roll off the table and look at giving it a bit of bounce as it rolls away. Then I can go back and start manually tweaking the inbetweens to create breakdowns and ensure that the path of the ball is as natural as possible.

Slide homework V2

Second attempt at the ball and slide task, this time reverting back to good old fashioned keyframe animation!

This isn't entirely finished; the drop of the ball is totally off and I'd originally wanted to have it bounce away as it hit the ground. I've sort of hit a brick wall with it, though, for reasons I'll get to in a moment.

I think it started out rather well - though a little quick on exiting the slide, I think the timing going down and shooting off at speed was heading along the right lines. However, I began to get really confused once the ball was on the table. I found that, where I'd not really considered my timing too much in advance, I was kind of working on the fly - which can sometimes work very nicely - but in an unfamiliar software environment it can be pretty detrimental as you're not really learning anything about the tools or how they can be applied. You're not entirely sure what you're aiming to create, so it's hard to see how the tools can be applied to achieve the desired effect.

I think I was skipping a lot of fundamental stages, creating too many keyframes (which should have acted as breakdowns) before I'd even set down the main keyframes, so the predictive/automatic inbetweens were going crazy and causing me to get very confused with my timings! Without laying down the basic timing it's very hard to get convincing animation in any case. You'd think I would have learned this by now!

I think that a lot of it is due to the unfamiliar environment. As I said in a previous post, 3D seems like such a radical departure that it's easy to forget that the same basic principles apply. "Keyframe" seems to mean something completely different when applied to digital animation, and I think that screwing up on this attempt has helped me to re-evaluate how I'm using the software. I've somehow convinced myself that 3D/digital animation requires a whole new skill set, which is of course completely untrue. It should simply be an extension of the pre-existing skills; applying what I already know to a different architecture.

I can now completely appreciate what Jon meant when he talked about the importance of planning in digital animation. That isn't to say that I've been totally thoughtless about these tasks - I've certainly been considering timing, but I think I'm too impatient, too anxious and too keen to get to the final result and prove to myself that I can do it. I imagine that's fairly common?

Anyway, going back to the animation itself; it doesn't look too bad now that I look at it - I think the basics were there - but by the time I'd gotten the ball onto the table I was so confused  by the mass of keyframes staring back at me that trying to fix it seemed an impossibly daunting task.

I'm going to go back a bit and try really thinking about this - timing it properly, considering exactly what I want the ball to do and laying out the keyframes on paper first - just like I would (or should) do with any conventional animation. It will then be much easier to pinpoint where my breakdowns need to go and which frames need tweaking by hand. I might even try my hand at one of those impossibly scary animation charts... doesn't matter how much I read about them, I still seem to be frightened off by the prospect of numbers! 

Croquet animation V2

Just realised I forgot to post my re-done croquet shots! Whoopsie!

I made some very minor tweaks to the croquet animation, probably not terribly noticeable with Blogger's horrible video compression! I altered the timing as the mallet swings back so it's a little faster and added a minor delay, just before it swings down. The downward swing could certainly use a little speeding up; seems a bit slow, considering the speed of the backwards swing. I tried to add a very slight overlap to the mallet after it finishes its swing; it drops back very slightly before coming to a rest. It's only minor and I think that if the swing was a little faster and the overlap a little more exaggerated, it would probably feel a bit looser and more lively.

I think the ball, despite my best efforts to create a slow in/deceleration, comes to too much of a sudden stop at the end. I've been finding Softimage's "predictive" inbetweens a little confusing to get to grips with, though I can't pinpoint why; I suppose it's best to go back and manually tweak them by hand in order to iron out the bugs, much like in After Effects, though it's not such a problem here with such basic animation. In the shot below you can see a large clump of keyframes; my attempt to "slow in" the ball to the ending pose.

I think I'm gradually getting to grips with the dope sheet. It certainly is more intuitive than the regular timeline... and it's not quite so headachey as the animation editor (which I know I'm going to have to conquer sooner or later!)

You might notice the weird red and blue afterimages following the ball in the screenshot above; that's the animation ghosting, Softimage's answer to onion skinning. It took me a while to figure out how to enable it!

Basically, you need to select the object(s) that you'd like to onion skin - in this case, the blue ball - and manually enable the ghosting feature. Open up the property page for the object (shortcut: Alt + Enter) Within the visibility tab there's a small button that says "Ghosting" - if this is checked on and ghosting is enabled within the viewport, you'll get a lovely wireframe trail showing you the position of the object on all the previous frames.

The option to enable ghosting within the viewport can be found in the same place as the headlight or object view options:

Simply check on the "Animation Ghosting" option and hey presto:

Lovely onion skinning! It's already proving infinitely useful in figuring out things like timing and just generally planning the animation. I'm hoping that, with a bit more practice, I'll begin to gain a better understanding of how things like timing and weight can better be achieved in Softimage. It's easy to forget that, even though the environment has changed, the basic principles remain the same. I'll probably go back and do some more tweaking to this a little later on now that I can better see what's wrong with it.

Lesson 02 — Explorer, Keyframes & Dope Sheet

Great lesson, learned a whole bunch (despite blog-related embarrassment...!) — the dope sheet I found particularly useful. I'd not previously been aware of it at all and it certainly answered many of the frustrations I'd encountered in my previous attempts at keyframing.

Initially, we were introduced to the basic animation interface and default timeline. We were shown how to set up the camera/output preferences - I'd been having great frustration with previous exports where all my stuff came out skewed no matter what I did so it was a relief to find out what I'd been doing wrong!

File -> Preferences -> Output Format

There are a number of preset output formats - however, these will be optimized for TV display, i.e. NOT square pixels. Best to use a custom preset! 

Ensure 'Maintain Picture Ratio' is UNCHECKED.

Pixel ratio: 1

Resolution: 1024 x 576 (widescreen)

Remember to double-check frame settings - should be working at 25fps. 

Hit 'Apply settings' to... well, apply the settings!

After setting up, we started by animating a simple object using basic keyframes on the default timeline. No fancy timing adjustments or dope sheet witchcraft here.

I, rather uncreatively, picked a sphere. And made it fly uncreatively across the screen. Hey, this was a technical exercise! Achieved simply by keyframing the scale and position values of a primitive sphere object.

We were then introduced to the dope sheet which allows for much more refined animation by providing greater control over keyframes. The dope sheet can be accessed by View -> General -> Dope Sheet, or alternatively by opening the Animation Editor (shortcut 0) and then clicking Editor -> Dope Sheet.

The dope sheet is, effectively, an expanded version of Softimage's default timeline. It displays all keyframes for all parameters of the selected object all at once - far more intuitive than the regular timeline, which simply displays all keyframes on one row which can cause a lot of really unnecessary confusion.

You can select and move all keyframes for all parameters by clicking the giant green square in the topmost row - very useful for making quick timing adjustments! Alternatively, you can select one or more keyframes for specific parameters simply by clicking the corresponding coloured square for each parameter. (Hold CTRL + click to select multiple keyframes)

We were provided with a premade scene file with a croquet mallet and ball. Using the dope sheet, we basically had to use the mallet to knock the ball from A to B, using the dope sheet to adjust timings where appropriate. 

Only really had 15 minutes to do this, so it's pretty unpolished at this stage and the timing's really squiffy. I tried to delay the hammer slightly before it comes swinging down to give it a little more character, though it still needs work. I'm thinking I may hold it at the furthest position for a little bit to add some anticipation. The ball is very static too - there's no feeling of contact or weight when the mallet strikes the ball and it moves very uniformly. I'm going to try and alter the timing so the ball decelerates before coming to a stop. I'm not entirely sure how to improve the impression of power when the mallet connects with the ball; I'm going to simply need to experiment with it a little bit. Maybe if the hammer swings a little faster it would help?

I've also gone over Jon's awesome exporting tutorial which, again, solves a lot of problems I'd previously encountered with exporting, so expect a post on that soon! 

Softimage XSI: Keyframe animation tests

I've sort of got the hang of the very basics of Softimage at this point (still getting used to shortcuts and whatnot) so I've started experimenting a bit with the actual animation capabilities. Nothing complex so far; I've had a go with keyframe animation in an attempt to figure out how it works. 

I did have screenshots of all the following exercises, but unfortunately some unforeseen technical problems forced me to re-install the Windows partition. I was a bit stupid and backed up my actual project files but forgot the screenshots... hey ho, lesson learned. I'll do my best to gabble my way through this and then re-take some shots later today!

 

The first attempt was the most straightforward piece of keyframing I could muster; sliding a ball across the floor. Mostly just trying to figure out how things actually work here before I start getting too fancy! 

Once I'd learned where all the buttons were, I tried messing around with timing and spacing a little bit.

I attempted to inject some sort of character into the ball — I was aiming to have it speed in and then slow to a stop, but Softimage has a slightly convoluted way of working with keyframes and I'm not quite used to it. I couldn't figure out how to move keyframes on the timeline, or delete them properly, so I was pretty much stuck with what I botched out first time. It's alright — it works, but the timing and speed is very off. There doesn't seem to be any onion skinning or anything so it's quite difficult to map out the spacing correctly — this was mostly guesswork!

After the second attempt I did a little more reading into how keyframes work to try and get a better understanding before I tried anything again. I managed to figure out how to edit and delete them at long last, so the third attempt was marginally more successful:

I'm not entirely sure why the ball is moving away from the camera, as I was positive that I'd animated it in a straight line as with the others — perhaps I messed something up with the camera settings or export. It could also be that I used the animation editor to tweak this one rather than standard keyframing — it's hard to describe without screenshots, but it's basically a big curve graph that displays keyframes on the parameters of an object (the position or scale, say) that allows you to very quickly see where the "rough" spots are and smooth it out — quite literally. Dragging the keyframes up or down on the graph alters the curve and adjusts the parameters so you can pretty quickly get a feel for the timing and how it's going to run before you even hit the play button.

I can see it being a really intuitive and useful way of animating but it takes some getting used to! As we see here the ball is perhaps too quick and there's not quite enough of a slow down at the end, but it's a start!