Accelerating motion
Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2019 4:33 pm
This is something I want to do quite often, and up till now I've instead always decided to do something else so as to avoid the issue. no more! Here 'tis:
The keyframe interpolations seem to be missing two types that seem they would be very useful. Accelerate in and out. Quite often I want something to move slowly, pick up speed, then stop abruptly. A bouncing motion would be a great example of this (though I realize there are other ways of doing that). Another example would be something zooming in from far away - it only looks right if the motion starts slowly when the object is far away, then speeds up when closer. If you cause an object to grow using linear interpolation, it looks unnatural because the speed of the object relative to the viewer appears to slow down as the object gets "closer". And before someone responds suggesting using camera motion instead of changing the object size, again, this is just an example. Another example would be animating a magnetic force. The object being attracted to the magnet would start slowly then stop abruptly when hitting the magnet. That's probably the most vivid example here.
The Ease In and Out interpolations are wholly inadequate and imho are not that noticeably different from the Smooth interpolation - I never use them. The Motion Graph doesn't have an obvious way to create a natural parabolic motion such as I'm describing, and after dragging keyframes around in Motion Graph I've never managed to do anything other than make it much worse - I never use it. (But my hunch is that's going to be the answer and I just don't know how to use it properly.)
So... what's the easiest and most effective way to create this kind of motion?
The keyframe interpolations seem to be missing two types that seem they would be very useful. Accelerate in and out. Quite often I want something to move slowly, pick up speed, then stop abruptly. A bouncing motion would be a great example of this (though I realize there are other ways of doing that). Another example would be something zooming in from far away - it only looks right if the motion starts slowly when the object is far away, then speeds up when closer. If you cause an object to grow using linear interpolation, it looks unnatural because the speed of the object relative to the viewer appears to slow down as the object gets "closer". And before someone responds suggesting using camera motion instead of changing the object size, again, this is just an example. Another example would be animating a magnetic force. The object being attracted to the magnet would start slowly then stop abruptly when hitting the magnet. That's probably the most vivid example here.
The Ease In and Out interpolations are wholly inadequate and imho are not that noticeably different from the Smooth interpolation - I never use them. The Motion Graph doesn't have an obvious way to create a natural parabolic motion such as I'm describing, and after dragging keyframes around in Motion Graph I've never managed to do anything other than make it much worse - I never use it. (But my hunch is that's going to be the answer and I just don't know how to use it properly.)
So... what's the easiest and most effective way to create this kind of motion?