Stop Motion Simulation

Got a question about whether you can use Ragdoll on characters animated on 2’s or 4’s, for an effect similar to hand-drawn 2D animation and stop motion.

To demonstrate what that could look like, I threw this together!

Note how the simulation remains stable, even though the input it technically really fast-moving. From here, if you wanted you could also make the simulation appear stepped by leaving only the 2nd or 4th key.

Enjoy!

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Hello! I am helping on a short at the moment, and came up with an interesting workflow just for this sutiation (regardless of how a character is animated). Use a TimeWarp Curve baked on 3’s set to Stepped.
Here’s the step-by-step:

  1. Select all the Animated Controls
  2. Go to Bonus Tools>Animation>Time Warp Animation
  3. Press Apply
  4. With the TimeWarp curve selected, open the Graph Editor
  5. Curves>Bake Animation
  6. Set “Sample by” to 3 (or 4, depending on the stepping you want to see)
  7. Press Bake
  8. Select all the keyframes on the timeWarp curve
  9. Press Stepped

Done! Your animation (which is still in Spline) is now in Stepped and on 3’s :slight_smile:

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Aha, that’s interesting! The curves stay untouched, and feed into the warp node which converts the output in real-time to stepped-looking keys. And it’s procedural, in that you can later redo the process and get it stepping on 2’s instead, still leaving your original keyframes untouched.

This should also work on simulation that has been baked, rather than modifying the actual keys like I did in the video above. Thanks for sharing!

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That’s exactly right! You can have a timeWarp for each character and then adjust their timing individually. For instance, in Spiderverse, when Miles and Peter are swinging between the trees, their stepped timing is different, then as the shot progresses, the timings sync. This would be SUPER easy by just adjusting the timing on the timeWarp keyframes for both characters. Since the animator is manipulating time, they can also pick the interpolated pose with insane precision (say, frames 55 and 56 look nice, but frame 55.34 pushes the pose to a place I REALLY like).

I made a tool to manage multiple TimeWarps in the scene. The user can:

  • create a new timeWarp
  • add/remove selected Nodes
  • turn the timeWarp on/off (due to a Maya “bug”/“feature”, to continue editing Animation, the timeWarp MUST be disabled)
  • nest timeWarps (brain-exploding move here, be careful)

If anyone would like to play with it, lemme know!

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Nice!!! thank for sharing !!!

smart trick !