Smoothing out Animations with the curve editor

Hello Guys and welcome to another edition of Animations on HypefroActive. Still on my Dance Animation shot and i want to share some tips used in achieving as well as polishing my it and today i'll be talking about the CURVE EDITOR. But before then please allow me to share a WIP of the shot. At this time there are no cameras and the shot is been culled from the perspective view and can be found by clicking right here http://youtu.be/SknUJPn6PaQ

That's right, today i'll be talking about the Curve Editor in 3dsMax. Where is the Curve Editor located and what is it? The curve editor is located on the standard tools bar, normally the third menu bar counting from the software windows title bar and is between the graphite and schematic view tool tabs. So it's like this, let's say you locate the group of snap tools, the ones looking like "red horse shoe magnets, then immediately after this group you've got the selection sets which is normally a blank space then the mirror and align tools, the layer, graphite and finally the graph editor. Yeah that is where the graph editor is located.

Now alot of the time you probably would have come across the graph editor and maybe think, yeah it's just one of those tools you can do without. Nope it's far from one of those tools you want to ignore. Truth is the graph editor helps you smoothen out motion paths and if the graph editor cant handle it, then nothing else in 3dsMax can or it's equivalent in any software. The graph editor is where the finishing touches to your animations are applied. It's the last resort and i pretty much regard it as my saloon or make up shop because that's what it does. It applies make ups to your animations. Over are some pictures of some shots that i took while animating and i want you to look at the neck area of the character. The Character is on a dance pose kind of what we call "komole" in Nigeria naturally occurring in a song's breakdown. Anyways the neck is over turned in the y-axis and that is not what i want. A lot of Animators would say push your character animations to the extreme

so that you get alot of change. Which is true especially for cartoon animations but in this case i wish to achieve otherwise. Though i could do that by going to every frame where i have those rotations and adjust them but because i have many of them i choose to work with the curve editor because it is faster, more interactive and i can easily foretell what it is i want and in what direction it should go. Not to talk about the advantages of smoothing out curves, making them linear, constraining a shape or bone to a point in time thereby eliminating the effect of sliding etc. So the second picture shows the problem, while the third picture shows the solution using the curve editor. The curve editor is a very powerful tool in any 3d animation software and if you really want to be good at animating then you should learn to use it effectively. Make it your friend.

That's all about the curve editor's role in my dance shot and i hope to see you guys soonest. So until then keep the dream alive and keep animating.