graph editor copy/paste keys erratic

[mestela]

my aim was to take the jumping cube anim, make a second cube, copy/paste the animation, then shift keys so that the cubes were jumping over each other. tried a few ways, going from general to specific:

go to frame 0, selected the first cube, 'cube.parent' at top of graph editor, copy keys. select second cube, select 'cube1.parent' in graph editor. paste keys. nothing is copied.

same as above, but this time set key on frame 2 (first keyframe on original cube), before pasting keys. keys are pasted, but all channels look like they get the values for translateX.

this time just copy single channel at a time. works, but have to be very careful; works if i have a single channel selected when i paste, but if i have multiple channels selected, the keys are pasted onto all channels. if keys already exist on a channel, the new keys are added, making a mess.

when trying to clean up corrupted channels, I tried to marquee select the bad keys and hit backspace, but often this would only delete a single key. eventually I could make it work by only deleting single keys at a time.

if i tried fixing things too much, I could get the graph editor into an invalid state, the mesh would disappear, the channel box would hide values, as would the graph editor, i'd have to just exit the page and reload my anim

my other thought was to export the anim, then apply it onto a new cube, but that didn't work either (i assume the names are explicit in the json export file, so the anim just got reapplied to the first cube).

[animanathome]

Wow, that sounds pretty painful. I'll have look at this first. Making the key view stable is our main priority. Thanks you for taking us through the steps!

[mestela]

Heh, once I understood what was happening I could make it work, see: https://moveme.io/animation/project/d9qmkF7Jb6nYysdCF/shot/JSy4HKa7hPL5sW5CM/version/KKos99ofKnBdio4Yi

[animanathome]

Good stuff! Really nice. Thanks for sharing! We'll look at how we can simplify the copy/paste behavior.

[mestela]

Cool, I know its asking a lot and its non-trivial; maya's copy/paste stuff is still a little hard to use, even with lots of options and copy paste modes, its been that way since I first started using it in 2001. I always end up trying to paste keys 4 or 5 different ways before finding the right one.

[animanathome]

It's important to have a better understanding of what the different options/behaviors are. As you mention, Maya has a lot of different ways to deal with pasting/merging curves. It looks like we'll have to go into a similar directions. Just to make sure you can do with you want to do.

Would be keen to know if you or anyone else has any suggestions for this (different from what maya does). We'll start by putting down or outlining some of the different scenarios/use cases here. Then we can see what the best way is to use them.

[mestela]

I'll find some animators and see what they think.

Thinking out loud, maybe a modal workflow? The problem with maya's system is it tries to pre-empt too many possibilities, even with the image previews they added at some point, you don't know what's right until you see it.

How about this:

-user ctrl-v's in the graph editor -keys are drawn at half opacity over existing keys with a bounding box, and buttons at the top toggle how the keys are applied. Eg, a 'insert' mode spreads keys apart and inserts these new ones, 'mix' interleaves old and new keys, 'overwrite' deletes old keys. You could also drag on the box to set the time offset, or have buttons to shortcut it to insert on first frame, or at time cursor, or append after existing frames. Also would need an option to apply values as additive to existing keys, or as absolute replace. -only once you have what you expect do you click the 'apply' button, or hit 'cancel' to leave your keys unaffected. -maybe from that point on, ctrl-v repeats the previous paste operation, ctrl-shift-v brings up the modal dialog.

I can see it in my head and its AMAZING. ;)

Might try and make an animated gif tonight to make that a little clearer...

On Monday, July 20, 2015, Emmanuel Seynaeve notifications@github.com wrote:

It's important to have a better understanding of what the different options/behaviors are. As you mention, Maya has a lot of different ways to deal with pasting/merging curves. It looks like we'll have to go into a similar directions. Just to make sure you can do with you want to do.

Would be keen to know if you or anyone else has any suggestions for this (different from what maya does). We'll start by putting down or outlining some of the different scenarios/use cases here. Then we can see what the best way is to use them.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/animanathome/movemebugs/issues/17#issuecomment-122746596 .

[animanathome]

Hmmm... yeah, that could work. I like it! Interactive visual feedback trumps everything! Putting it together however is quite a bit of work. I'll start working on it while prioritizing bug fixes.