How do i make Loops and put them in the timeline?

[darklarik]

Hello, newbie here. I was wondering what is the process to create a loop onto a rig.

I have this really crude character who is an Baby with Angel wings and Kyle Gass's face playing a guitar. I want to create loops on the wing flapping to play throughtout the animation, and another on his Left floating hand to go up and down on the Guitar (which is set to be a switch), im trying to make a funny adaptation of Master Exploder for a School assignment.

Please use big words, im slow and not very good on the technical terms :C Have mercy!

[Greenlaw]

There are basically two ways to create loops.

The obvious way is to copy and paste the keys multiple times on the timeline. If the animation isn't too complicated, and this is essentially a one-off, this method is fine.

The other way to set the last key in your loop to Cycle. Do this by right-clicking over the key and select Cycle. The Keyframe window will appear and you'll see settings for the Cycle. Absolute will set the key to exact frame entered in the box. Relative will count back the number entered in the box.

A lot of times, I'll copy the first frame to the position of the last frame to ensure that loop is exact. If you do this, you want the loop to start after the first frame, not on the first frame, otherwise you will be repeating that keyframe.

When you use Cycle, the animation will repeat until it the playback marker encounters a new keyframe. Then it will play the new animation that follows.

You'll need to set a loop keyframe at the end of every channel that is a part of your loop. This could be bones, shading fx, point animations, etc., anything that's keyframeable.

If this is something you intend to re-use, you can add the keyframes to an Action. Then, you can insert the keyframes the next time you want to re-use them.

Another option is to put the looping keys inside a Smart Bone Dial Action. The cool thing with this is you can control the speed of the loop by keyframing the Smart Bone Dial for different durations. To do this, set up your looping keyframes, then make the duration of the SBD include enough keyframes to play the loop multiple times. Basically, you want the dial to be able to play the loop for as many times as you'll ever need. Of course, if that turns out to not be enough when your animating the scene, you can always loop the SBD on the timeline.

You'll notice other options in the Keyframe panel. Probably the most interesting is Additive Cycle, which continues the loop at the position where it ends. I don't think there's much, if any, info about it in the manual but there are a couple of official video tutorials about it online.

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Here's a quick example of a wing loop:



The keyframes are only in the bones layer and they look like this:



Notice I start the loop at frame 2. This is because frame 1 and the last frame of the loop are the same pose. Also notice that when I'm making a loop, I like to freeze the selected bones for each keyframe. This makes it easier to edit and retime in the timeline. If you don't freeze the keys, you may get odd interpolations when retiming the animation. To retime, just slide each column of keys, or to retime the entire range select all the keys in the loop and use Alt to stretch the selection.

Here's the file if you'd like to pick it apart.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcpnl7gigk5w7 ... .moho?dl=0

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

My daughter was watching me set up the bird wing, and she asked if I can do that with a dragon wing. Nothing really different here, so just for fun...





As in the other wing demo, only a few bones are keyframed. If this was for an actual character rig, I'd do this a bit differently...but my daughter said that's alright, I should be working on other stuff now.