Dope sheet

[fused]

Dope sheet

This is something that I have asked for in the past but never added to the wish list so here goes.
Martin will you fix it for me to have a dope sheet in Cheetah.

Thank you

Andrew
aged(7 3/4)

 

[frank beckmann]

Hi.
Because I have first to google this out, maybe one have a look here:
http://www.animationpost.co.uk/doping/dope-intro.htm

Frank

 

[fused]

Basically in 3D the dope sheet lists all the elements of a scene and shows the key frames. Here's an example from another app.:

Andrew

 

[Pierre]

I second you on that. I have been working with Director some time ago, which has a dope sheet as well (of course, should I say). That is more than usefull when you want to animate several objects in the scene.

p*

 

[podperson]

Or synch to a sound track.

 

[capnchunky]

Not to overcomplicate things, but if you're syncing frame-by-frame to another source it would probably be valuable to be able to set an arbitrary frame rate, such as 12 or 24fps for film, or 29.97fps (ugh) for NTSC TV.

 

[Dranix]

Shouln't this be done in animation-packages like iMovie or FCP?

 

[fused]

Alot of 3D packages have it. The feature would allow you to select groups of key frames and tweak them, it's a lot quicker doing it this way.

Andrew

 

[podperson]

Shouln't this be done in animation-packages like iMovie or FCP?

No because you can't fix animation post-hoc using an editing suite (or 2d animation package). Imagine you're rendering a figure doing stuff in time to music with motion blur...

If you rendered too many frames between two given beats you could reinterpolate the frames and kind of fix it, but you can't create new, motion-blurred frames if you rendered too few.

Far easier to synch the animation properly in the 3d tool and render the right number of frames.

As for 25fps 29.97 fps etc. -- one of the pros from the ElectricImage forums used to say (I paraphrase): "I render EVERYTHING at 24fps... if it's good enough for Hollywood Features it's good enough for TV. And as a bonus you render 4% faster than PAL (25 fps) and 20% faster than NTSC (~30 fps)."

 

[fused]

Frustrated

Having attempted to produce a short animation using a rigged character and props I just wanted to bump this thread.
Trying to tweak keyframes for an IK chain when you're switching between autokey and manual key is a complete nightmare, you need a visual display of the whole scene in the Key Editor window or things become nearly impossible real quick.
Cheetahs animation features are amazing but for animating a complex character, ummm...
Any suggestions or workflow tips to get around this would be most appreciated.