New Animation Curve Editor: Fine Grain Control of Animations

This was a long-needed addition to the incredibly basic animation editor. I applaud the team for putting this in!

I will make it clear that this is an incredibly valueable tool when animating, because it can turn any animation into a completely different style, or even just fine-tune movements.

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I’m not an animator I have no clue what any of this does. Can someone give us an example like a before and after using the new feature to showcase the update in video format?? :pray:

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Before today, the only way for developers/artists to create an animation in the ACE was to use the DopeSheet view. While this is a standard way of manipulating each pose the animation goes through, its representation is lacking some visual information. You can see an example of a DopeSheet in the post above (that’s the first screenshot, the one with all the little diamonds).

The new Curve Editor is another standard tool, but it gives a much better representation of how a value evolves over time. For instance, the next screenshot shows two blue curves going from 0 to 0.10 and 0.25 respectively. This is much more intuitive. Additionally, adding tangent controls allows artists to fine tune their animation even more.

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I was sure this was already a feature, but apparently not… :upside_down_face:

Probably won’t use this much since I only animate every now and again but seems incredibly useful.

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Yes, any curve animations you create (with or without this new curve editor) will be usable in your experiences!

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I tested it, and it’s not working for me tho, I use an AnimationController in an empty place I own and it just doesnt move, but in the editor works fine

Im using this in the command bar in-game,in client and server and it just doesnt move
workspace.BuildingHammer.Animator:LoadAnimation(workspace.BuildingHammerAnim.Equip):Play()

is it out for using?
image

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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:

image
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?
image
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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