How to use the graph editor (SFM)

oh my God this guy's animating in motion editor yo everyone look at this guy he's literally literally an ocean editor hey hey bro let me just walk over here real quick all right so it's called motion editor for a reason it's good for editing motion but absolutely not for creating it you're giving yourself significantly more work and that's inevitably gonna lead to significantly more mistakes take it from me someone who used to animate an exclusively motion editor instead you're going to want to use graph editor today we're going to talk about how to animate with it if you already use it stick around because you might learn a few new things we're going to be covering all of these buttons and the functionality so firstly graph editor is this tab on the right side once you select that you can cycle between clip editor and graph editor with the Tab Key now the N key will place something called a keyframe think of this keyframe as your character's pose on that specific frame this can be applied to any individual bone what I advise is that you select your character under outliner and then place a keyframe at the start of your animation now whenever you move anything sfm will Auto Place the key frame at whatever frame you're on the further apart your frames are the slower the timing of the animation will be you'll notice that when you move things you see these lines show up those lines represent movement the steeper the lines are the more fast moving the animation generally is alright so the buttons firstly the select button here when you click and drag on the graph you can select these dots the hotkey is Q next is the move button this lets you move points around the graph you can alter poses this way the hotkey for the move button is Middle Mouse button this is the pan button it lets you pan around your graph in case some of your points are off screen the hotkeeper pan is alt middle Mouse button then there's the scale button it will essentially bring all selected points toward or away from the selected y-axis value basically the numbers you see here on the far left side of the screen if you click near zero and drag down it'll scale the intensity of the animation down and if you drag up it will increase the intensity of the animation and the hotkey for scale is control right Mouse lastly is zoom self-explanatory it adjusts the zoom of the graph it's good for looking at the curves of smaller movements the hotkey for Zoom is alt-right Mouse onto the juicy Parts this is essential you will be using these three tangent options linear spline and step tangents the way I prefer to use this feature is by selecting keyframes and clicking on the tangent type that I want to use this will affect all white tangents linear self-explanatory it turns your animation into a flat point A to point B line this is great if you want to get rid of overshoot from spline Keys which are sfm's default speaking of which spline tangents are awesome they give you smooth organic transitions between poses blending your tangents together you'll be using these like 90 of the time lastly is stepped these basically cause abrupt instantaneous changes this is perfect for jump cuts and cameras and for animating in pose to pose also known as blocking you can choose what types of tangents sfm uses by default when placing new keyframes by selecting them in this drop down menu right here don't don't ask me what all the others do I I don't know and I don't care I've got over 50 18 000 hours clocked on sfm and I've never once used any of the other choices now let's talk about that slightly more advanced stuff you may be wondering what these three buttons are these are toggleable buttons so make sure that when you're done using them you turn them back off by default you should have the middle option selected I've looked all over and I have absolutely no idea what this option does I've never disabled it in in my life and I've had zero problems so I personally recommend just not touching it to the right you'll see normalized curve display this makes it so that all the Curves in your graph fit on screen I think to the left is offset this is an interesting one it allows you to place keyframes over existing animation without actually blending the two together think of it as additive animation this is great for adding in new animation without getting rid of the animation you already had in place we're gonna take it back to select mode real quick When selecting a keyframe if you're particularly Keen eyed you might have noticed these pale magenta colored lines with boxes at the end of them these are tangents basically where a line touches but doesn't intersect a curve at a given point I just call them handles for Simplicity in select mode you you can drag over the box of the handle to select it and then move it up and down with the move tool this will adjust the curve of your animation between your two keyframes that will change the timing of your animation this is very useful for tweaking movements just keep in mind that whenever you select new tangents it'll automatically reset any changes you've made well that's the gist of it that's everything you need to know about graphs be sure to share this video around I want my content to spread like The Rona like this video If it helped you and leave a comment if you made it this far if if you're new around here and you want to see more sfm content in your feed drop a subscribe drop a subscribe and turn on notifications please it's not it's not like I'll be blowing up your notifications or anything and if you want updates on video progress the occasional polls on future content and notifications on when next videos will be dropping my Discord is in the description thanks for watching I've been CGI Joe and until next time keep it classy foreign [Music]

Channel: CGI Joe

Views: 25,966

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Id: d7g9X5KiPoo

Length: 6min 33sec (393 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023