guymelefsfm
asked:
Hey, just stumbled on your Mercy animation and I wanted to tip my hat off to you. I'm not really into Overwatch but the animation itself is simply astounding, the motion is great and smooth and all the little details like him grabbing her arm etc. just left me in awe. I'm a sfm debutant still struggling with the robotic uncanny valley so this is very inspiring to me. From what I saw of your sfm sessions you use a lot of bookmarks, is it how you smooth everything ?

Thanks. Haven’t actually played it so I dunno what I’m missing out on.

I don’t feel qualified to give animation advice but here are some ways I smooth my animations. Firstly I spam the crap out of the spline (3) hotkey on my keyframes. SFM happens to be the buggiest piece of animation software in existence and I don’t trust it to keep my curves intact in the graph editor. Sometimes there’s no choice, such as when a bone is parented/unparented and leaves a bunch of curves you don’t wanna touch. But sfm will screw those up anyway because fuck you.

You can also get a better look at the graph curves of a bone by locking it. The parent bone stops affecting it so you get pristine curves with no outside influence.

I’ve found the motion editor’s (which actually isn’t buggy like the graph) smooth and round presets super useful for smoothing stubborn parts of an animation. You might select just rotation or position, or a single axis, maybe lock the bone, select a green area, drag the handles to create falloff, and use either preset (rarely to full).

One more trick is to watch your animation in slow motion to get a much clearer view of imperfections. I remember finding out the hotkey for this but it ended up breaking shit in sfm tradition. The other way to do it is by dragging the upper part of the clip editor timeline and letting go. You have to drag very little for slow-motion playback.