Any way to move an entire keyframe at once?

I'm just learning to do keyframe animation on a rigged character, by posing the bones. Here's what I've learned so far:
  • Turn on the "key whole hierarchy" mode button below the timeline.
  • Every time you want to record a key, select the skeleton root before clicking the Record button.
  • For my purposes, at least, I want to turn off keying Position and Scale while in this mode. If I want to animate the root position, then for any key that moves the root, I need to turn off the "key whole hierarchy" mode, turn on Position, click Record, and then toggle those two modes to get back to normal.
So far so good (if annoyingly fiddly). But one thing I can't figure out:

Suppose I decide I need to stretch out one part of the animation a little bit — say, move one pose over a few frames. My experimentation seems to indicate that to do this I have to manually select each and every bone in the hierarchy (there are about 50 of these), and drag each one over. Even if I have the "key whole hierarchy" mode button on.

Is this really true, even in Cheetah3D 7? No way to move the key frame with all keyed data at once?
 
For animating I would add IK (inverse kinematics) to the wrists and ankles and the use of IK targets.

That way you only key one or a few joints at most.
 
This "Flatman" was animated by keying only the hips for the up and down motion
(3 keyframes) and the left hand target for the wave action (5 keyframes).

flatman.gif
 
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* There exists a Java script (a tool script, it may be called "Scale Take") which allows you to expand a take by a specified factor. If you need to stretch or compress just a part of a take it should be possible to split the take into three parts, and apply the script to just the relevant module of the take.
* I have never tried that, so you need to experiment, clearly with a copy of your .jas model.

:whistle: Well, I just did a test and this seems to work, admittedly on a fairly simple animation. I suggest you use the alien walk help as a template and see if this scripts functions properly on a complex skeletal hierarchy.
* At the end of this exercise, you need to merge the previously split takes again.
 
No, of course you don't have to select and move every single keyframe of every joint. I am not sure that I understand your problem correctly, but actually you have already described it as it should - select the root joint, activate the key hierarchy and move the keyframe. I have attached an example. All green joints have been changed. If you move the right root-keyframe, all others moves with it.

Just make sure that you have previously recorded the keyframe of root you want to move with the key hierarchy activated so that all joints move.

But maybe I misunderstood the problem... :unsure:
 

Attachments

  • keyframe_test.jas.zip
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OH! At first I could not reproduce what you describe. But finally I figured it out:
  • If you grab any of the selected keys in the "Keys" tab, and drag that, it changes for only that joint (even if it is the root joint). BUT,
  • If you grab the keyframe indicator in the timeline itself, and drag that, it moves it for all joints (though as you said, only when the root joint is selected; otherwise, this too moves the keys for only the selected joint).
I was using the first method before. I'll take care to use the second from now on. Thanks!
 
Nice work figuring this out. I don't usually use the Key Hierarchy setting.

With the root joint selected, selecting the Key Hierarchy button make all keys in the rig to appear in the timeline, very cool.

I was going to recommend a script like Helmut did, but thanks to Lydia and Joe, it's not needed.
 
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