Animating a character to do a backflip - problem

[Draise]

I am animating a character to do a jump then a back flip to later land in a similar pose he had.

This may be a noobish question... but this has me baffled.

But I have run into an error that I believe will pull up some future errors in clip blending. When I keyframe the rig controls, some of the parent controls need to rotate -360 degrees. Once they do, they need to reset back to zero degrees, or the default pose (0 degrees). But the last few keyframes keyframe, from -360 degrees to 0 degrees has a terrible jump.

Will this pose a future problem when I want to loop or blend clips from the default value? (blend to or from a 0 degree to a -360 degree clip value?)

In the Fcurve editor it looks like a nice little slope as things rotate backwards, until the last keyframe where it quickly reverses and flips back and jumps back up to zero degrees from -360 degrees.

Example:



Is there another way of keyframing rotation values to clock over back to 0 degrees without having to reverse it's direction from whence it came? (like a loop from frame 1 back to frame 1 without a constant fall off fcurve offset nor a reverse value?)

[Draise]

Ah never mind, the clips blend from an end keyframe value of -360 to a start keyframe of 0 without any issues.

Still, I wonder why these rotation values don't tick over to 0 degrees again and just exponentially increase beyond 360+ degrees.

[Mathaeus]

just for info, animation mixer uses quaternion interpolation by default, that is, shortest path between angles, so it blends smoothly between 360 and zero. It will do the same between 720 and zero, and so on. Default for keying is Euler interpolation, which means, no way to blend smoothly between 360 and zero. If you place keys across one frame, even you'll see nothing wrong in viewport, it will do a long motion blur in render. Not good idea.
Just for experiment, you can convert Euler interpolation to quaternion (and back), in animation panel at bottom of UI. Then you'll be able to do mentioned blend. Anyway, if you want continuous rotation, you have to place keys at less than 180 degree, also interpolation behaves differently.

[Draise]

Thanks for this info, I will keep that into mind and experiment. And I'm glad that there is a Euler way to animate! I will do your experiment suggestion, thanks for the info.