Stop Motion Effect

[motion-design]

I've created an animation of a piece of crumpled paper opening from a ball to a flat shape useing blend shape (with 12 in betweens). The inside of the paper has a sequenced video footage textured to it. At present, the animation has a nice smooth motion by keying the blend shape slider.

I was wondering how to give the animation of the paper opening a subttle stop motion effect. I thought to use After Effects (time effects) but I can't allow the video texture to change speed. I certainly would appreciate any ideas.

-E

[joojaa]

Create a new time node and connect all the keyframed tiems to tht node and animate it instead.

[motion-design]

Joojaa,

Thank you for your response. However, I can't seem to figure out how to create a new "time" node. Could you give more detail? I'd appreciated it if you could also expound on how to connect keys from another animation to the new "time" node. Thank you.

-E

[nurnie]

Remeber that stop motion is not filmed on ones, but two's or three's depending on the speed of the action. Therefore, each 'frame' of animiation should hold for a frame or two before progressing to the next animated 'frame'. Do this in post by making each rendered frame duration the length of 2-3 frames depending on the look you want.

[motion-design]

Nurnie, thanks for your comments. However, I can't do the fix in post due the fact that the sequenced video texture on the inside of the paper needs to retain its frame rate. In other words, the texture can't have the stop motion effect applied to it.

The good news is that I found a working soulution. Since I'm using a blend shape (with 12 in-betweens) animation getting the crupled paper to open, I'm only dealing with 1 animation curve in the animation graph editor. The curve only had 2 keys...the start key (paper crumpled) and the end key (paper opened). I selected the curve and under the 'Curves' menu pull-down I selected 'Bake Channel'. In my case, I changed the baking options to step size 10 (due the fact that my animation need to hapen over 20 sec.) Then I selected the baked curve and under the 'Tangents' pull-down I selected 'Stepped'. To add some randomness, I moved random points up, down, left and right. I even deleted some keys, which added to the randomness. In the end it worked quite well.

I sure would like to learn more about Joojaa suggestion. It sounds like a very clever way to achieve the same results.

-E

[joojaa]

Ok here let theis be your base scene, pase and run:

CODE
{
file -f -new;
sphere;
playbackOptions -min 0 -max 100;
currentTime 0;
setKeyframe {"nurbsSphere1"};
currentTime 100;
move -r  -wd 7.100956 10.327584 -5;
setKeyframe {"nurbsSphere1"};
}

Now forgive my shorthand but now you have a sphere moving lineary Now lets make it accelerate. All this is just gui stuff as is what follows, with exception of createNode.

CODE
{
createNode time;
connectAttr -f time2.outTime  nurbsSphere1_translateX.input;
connectAttr -f time2.outTime  nurbsSphere1_translateY.input;
connectAttr -f time2.outTime  nurbsSphere1_translateZ.input;
expression -s "time2.outTime=time*time*5.7";
}

Now it accelerates