FCurve reverse/flip - possible?

[krispo]

hi,
im trying to 'reverse' a series of fcurves, so to produce the effect of reversing an animation.... eg i have an animation of a character sidestepping to the right. if i playback this animation backwards (end to start), the sidestep is to the left.

i assume that if i could reverse the fcurves (rather like scaling them in the -1 along the timescale), i would get the result, and could complete a left sidestep pretty quickly with little modifications.

does anyone know how to do this, or if it is possible? I can't remember if i could do it in soft, but i dont think ive ever tried this before... it would be a very useful thing to know though.

cheers!
john.

john@uds.se
www.afilmcalleddads.com

[mikael]

In reply to:
hi,
im trying to 'reverse' a series of fcurves, so to produce the effect of reversing an animation.... eg i have an animation of a character sidestepping to the right. if i playback this animation backwards (end to start), the sidestep is to the left.

i assume that if i could reverse the fcurves (rather like scaling them in the -1 along the timescale), i would get the result, and could complete a left sidestep pretty quickly with little modifications.

does anyone know how to do this, or if it is possible? I can't remember if i could do it in soft, but i dont think ive ever tried this before... it would be a very useful thing to know though.

cheers!
john.

john@uds.se
www.afilmcalleddads.com

I think I know what you are looking for. If so, Animation Toolbox (v2) will do it for you, a mel script that's downloadable from highend3d.
Select the curves you want to flip, choose the RandomScale tab and enter "-1" in both the min/max fields (to flip them). Then enter 9999 in the pivot field (tacky, I know), that will scale the curves individually with the pivot at the first keyframe of the curve. Then hit the scale value button!

[krispo]

scale the curves individually with the pivot at the first keyframe of the curve. Then hit the scale value button!

thanks mikael, i can look into that script. in the meantime, i figured out how to do it within maya. you have to make sure all your fcurves have keys at the start and end of the sequence. pick them all, and go into the scale box. if the sequence goes from 1 to 20, choose start and end values of 20 and then 1 respectively... this flips them and seems to work.

thanks again,
john-