United3dArtists Archive

I've made, rendered, and exported to eMac a couple of animations, but they all have the same flaw - they play in a jerky way instead of smoothly.

I've got a 2.4 Ghz running at 1 G RAM, and even though that's pretty feeble for Truespace, I would have thought it would be enough to run animations smoothly. Would a speed of 25fps instead of 30fps make all that much difference?

There must be some optimum settings to make sure that animations play in a smooth, realistic way.

So what do I need to do?

Thanks,
Kurt

Hi Kurt, don't think your Ram or CPU is causing the problem.
Perhaps you've got a very slow harddisk or it is fragmented. So try to make defragmentation run on your HD and look afterwards if video is playing better ...

-BM.

Edit ps:
I don't know which codec you were using for the *.avi - if you saved the animation very big and uncompressed, this could be too much data per second to run in realtime - then your hardware is the guilty - save it at a smaller screensize or save it compressed with a codec ...

hmmm, difficult to say. Can you better explain what you mean with "jerky" or give as a link to the video so we can try this also.

BooxieMalone wrote:Hi Kurt, don't think your Ram or CPU is causing the problem.
Perhaps you've got a very slow harddisk or it is fragmented. So try to make defragmentation run on your HD and look afterwards if video is playing better ... [/quote0

I'll do that, Booxie. Wouldn't be surprsied if it were very fragmented by now.

Edit ps:
I don't know which codec you were using for the *.avi - if you saved the animation very big and uncompressed, this could be too much data per second to run in realtime - then your hardware is the guilty - save it at a smaller screensize or save it compressed with a codec ...

That'll be the problem!! I do save them uncompressed, then convert them to avi in VirtualDub.

Back to the drawing board!!

Thanks, Booxie.

DesignDevil wrote:hmmm, difficult to say. Can you better explain what you mean with "jerky" or give as a link to the video so we can try this also.

When they play, instead of seeing the object moving along smoothly, you can see each frame changing to the next frame, like a series of tiny steps. It's very brief, and almost looks like natural motion, but not quite. Like slowing down a film to about 10 fps.

If it's still doing it after I've tried Booxie's tips, I'll try to link an animation to the forum.

When using Virtual dub to combine the Images did you change the incoming FPS option? I thik it defaults to 10 and if I am understanding that correctly it means that it is attempting to change 10 incoming frames per second into 30 FPS outgoing. This will triple each frame and result in serious slowdown with the replay. if you change the incoming FPS to about 25-30 which is what Truespace is supposedly exporting it should speed up your anamation imensly.

Karthogen wrote:When using Virtual dub to combine the Images did you change the incoming FPS option? I thik it defaults to 10 and if I am understanding that correctly it means that it is attempting to change 10 incoming frames per second into 30 FPS outgoing. This will triple each frame and result in serious slowdown with the replay. if you change the incoming FPS to about 25-30 which is what Truespace is supposedly exporting it should speed up your anamation imensly.

Well, that's good to know!!!!!!!

I'll check that, Karthogen, thank you very much!!

The built in trueSpace keyframe interpolation is imprecise and doesn't do such a good job and tends to produce a kind of "frame skip" when rendering. That's why I created the Procedural Animation Toolkit -- which gives smoother procedural animations.

Yeah it seems, to have some instability even when running keyframe anamations on my system. but suposedly it is calculating the the movements between your keyframe based on 30 frmaes per second.

Karthogen wrote:Yeah it seems, to have some instability even when running keyframe anamations on my system. but suposedly it is calculating the the movements between your keyframe based on 30 frmaes per second.

I wonder if there's an optimum formula for moving objects, then. For instance, after I add a start keyframe, and then assign a certain number of frames for the animation, then grab the object's widget and drag the object where I want it to go, then add a final keyframe... (deep breath)... what if I haven't in fact assigned enough frames for the object to get to its destination without "hurrying", (that is, skipping frames)?

There must be an optimum or ideal number of frames to assign to any given object movement. But how can you tell what that is?

Kurt

Timing is a very difficult thing - sometimes.

I am using Motion Studio and this has one positive thing included "skip frames on playback". With this switched on i get the right feeling for timing. TS himself ist mostly to slow to show the animation on 1:1 Timing or 30FPS.

The other trick is: Hide all objects which are not "importend" at the moment where you adjust the timing. TS has then not so many things to show and this helps to make it faster.

For "retiming" you can do the following. Attached is a image that shows how you can move keyframes. In this case i recorded a key at Frame 24. If this is to slow i select all keyframes, choose the right VIEW in the Scene Editor, and than i drag the keys to the right place - in the example to Frame 15. The VIEW is called Dope Sheet in other applications and is especialy for such things.

I hope that helps.

DesignDevil wrote:Timing is a very difficult thing - sometimes.

I've got Motion Studio but haven't installed it yet. I'll try it.

Meanwhile, I'll try what you suggested, DD. Thanks very much for the picture - it makes it much easier.

Cheers,
Kurt