New Animation Curve Editor: Fine Grain Control of Animations

Can someone post a comparison video? My PC isn’t set up currently (just moved), and I can’t check the update myself.

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Splendid.

Just a question, will this work for the Blender plugin that is used by many animators like me?
The plugin exports every single frame as a keyframe, so I do not know if it’d be easy, or even possible, to be able to use this feature with it.
Amazing feature nonetheless.

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Nice to see an important change. Having a tool to compete with Moon or using Blender to animate has been long overdue.

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Oh that looks familiar :thinking:

On a more serious note: I’m glad the built in plugin finally gets some love. This will help studio animators a great deal. Bad for me though, because I can’t sell my plugin for as much anymore when I eventually release it :sob:

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Curves for NumberSequence editors are something I’ve always needed be it ParticlesEmitters, Beams etc. If you make a feature request be sure to message me and I’ll support it

But why is this announced again since there’s a another topic?[Enabled] Beta Release of the Curve API for Animation Authoring

After opening a the KeyframeSequence in the ACE, you can click on the curve button and you’ll be asked to confirm that you want to convert it to a Channel Animation.

Keep in mind however that this will just create curves between the keyframes that have been created by the Blender plugin, so the end result will probably have more keys than necessary, and you might want to prune some of them.

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This announces the Curve Editor that uses the Curve API.

Developers and animators did not have the proper tools to create Curve Animations. They had to rely on the Dope Sheet alone, which did not give them a proper view of the curves.

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Unfortunately I am not able to because regular promotions have been frozen for years at this point with no communication on when they will resume.

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i for real love that new feature, but when i was using a placeholder animation for a rolling system (i converted the placeholder animation to the curve thing) it crashed my studio, i dont really know the reason

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Can someone give a comparison of how an animation would’ve looked before without this and how it would look with it? Would be greatly appreciated so that I can understand this update abit more.

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With no changes, it would be completely the same.

However, if you changed some of the curves, the animation would be a lot more fluid rather than linear (if you use cubic)

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Lets Go!!!

This is a great step in the right direction. This will definitely make the animation editor a lot more useful. However, I don’t think I’ll be using it on blender (Blender is a lot more powerful and has some more tools that I think you need to implement). Still a great update!

I would like to suggest A few things:

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You need to make it easier to tell what axis each curve is controlling. Because I find this very hard to tell which is which


In Blender these curves are color coded. (The ones in studio might be color coded? The color seems kind of off, blue, orange, green??? Seems kinda weird. I would recommend change those colors).

And when you click a curve to work with in Blender you’ll see a box light up for what’s being edited.

And in studio… uhh. Where are they??? Really hard to tell what I’m actually editing.

This next one is mostly just personal preference, but I find it annoying when it Scrolls down automatically when I start to make a curve go down to far. (Blender does not do this and simply makes it go off-screen. I might just be used to this. I would like an option for this however).

You’re getting there! This update is a very good step in the right direction. I just think that this graph editor is a bit lack luster (At least compared to Blender).

Also, out of curiosity. Why weren’t you able to add Bezier curves a long with this? Are there some technical things with ROBLOX preventing it from happening right now? Or is it just tricky to implement?

Edit:


Ok, I messed with a bit more uhh. That is a lot of colors… Stick to red, green and blue. And maybe make position changes a lighter or darker shade of the colors? Or maybe outline them?
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I also found that clicking the down arrow on the part you’re trying to animate will show what’s editing what. I do think it might be a bit tricky for a newer animator to find this. Though maybe I’m wrong. I think this should be visible by default.

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I see you found the corresponding colors in the tracklist! If there are too many colors, you can just select the position or the rotation track to focus on what you want to see. We wanted to use different colors for the case where the entire track (LeftUpperArm) was selected.

Bezier curves (weighted tangents) are tricky. Not so much during editing, but during real time evaluation, especially when you have dozens of characters being animated at the same time. On a phone :slight_smile:. We are evaluating solutions to that specific problem.

Edit:

This next one is mostly just personal preference, but I find it annoying when it Scrolls down automatically when I start to make a curve go down to far. (Blender does not do this and simply makes it go off-screen. I might just be used to this. I would like an option for this however).

We wanted the canvas to show as much of the curve(s) as possible, with as little interaction as possible, but that leads to some unwanted side effects such as the one you describe. We’ll improve that!

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I see, that makes sense. Having all that going on at once on a phone would be quick taxing on performance. What are your current ideas for a solution? (If you can’t share that yet I understand. But if you can I would love to hear about what you’re doing to try and fix it)!

I have a few ideas as to how this could be improved.
Make it go offscreen like in Blender (If possible). Or maybe make it slowly zoom out and show more. I think the main reason I dislike it is because of the speed. It jumps down way to fast. I think the current way it’s setup could work better if it were slowed down by a lot. (When doing precise editing fast, uncontrollable jumps like that would make it pretty hard). You could also use multiple of these methods and make it so a user can pick witch they want to use (I would recommend making them adjustable too).

Since were here I’d like to bring up a suggestion for the animation editor that’s non graph editor related. I think you should make the default TimeLine Unit frames apposed to seconds. Most other software’s (From what I can tell) use frames apposed to seconds. I very much prefer frames over seconds. also think maybe the options should be along the top and not in this tiny settings button.


Look at all that unused space! I’d at least put the TimeLine Unit option and the frame rate option up here, as some games may prefer to use 24 fps, while other use 60. Having that easily accessible would be a very user friendly feature and great time saver. (Brought this up because I think that this would also be an important change).

I’m glad I could help :slight_smile:!

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So I’m really enjoying this update so far, very nice to have control over animation to this level.

I do have a few questions such as this problem where when I try to animate a negative rotation to a positive it tends to go around the entire other way, This may be due to my lack of knowledge on how rotations are supposed to work, but it would be great if someone could help me out. heres an example :

And my other question (I come from blender animator) is will we be able to move in and out the tangents, Cause i noticed you can only rotate them at the moment.
image

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You can already choose what unit to use in the settings menu (top right corner of the ACE)

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The issue is that the last keyframe brings the arm back to its original orientation. If you add 360 degrees to the value of the last keyframe it should be fine.

What you are asking regarding the length of the tangents is related to Bézier curves/weighted tangents, there’s already a discussion about that somewhere above.

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Switched some of my animations to these, it’s wayyyyy smoother. But now my game crashes near instantly when any of these animations play, in-studio and in the player.
Would really like a fix asap.

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So @Parraing we can just update Roblox Studio app and start using it?

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