Hi all. I'm not an animator by trade (I'm a programmer/designer) but sometimes I do an animation or two and I always have trouble with a specific problem, so I'm looking for some tips.
Let's say I want to make a looping animation of a wave traveling along a string. So I have a chain of bones that each somehow modulates its angle over time. It might look something like this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/eg1xijq77vynl ... e%2023.png
First step is to take each bone and give each bone a sine-type fcurve like so:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cfjl7ujvtgzdw ... e%2024.png
But that will only cause the thing to curl open and closed over and over, so we need to stagger the fcurves temporally like so:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jjq3cj5bm46y8 ... e%2025.png
I've moved the fcurve for bones 1 and 2 forward in time to simulate this wavy motion, but now my animation (which goes from frame 0 to frame 100) doesn't loop anymore. I would have to somehow copy the part of the fcurve that went past frame 100 back over to the left to get myself back to looping.
How would a pro animator deal with this?
Note: I'm using SFM to animate because it ties in very well with my game's production pipeline. There may be a technical solution to this sort of thing in Max or Maya and I would like to learn about that, but I'm hoping for a workflow solution, ie some way I can change my behavior, rather than change my tool.
Thanks very much.