Spline Animation

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Onceyou created and exported your Spline scene, you can add the scene to your Webflow site. Webflow has a native Spline scene element, which you can style like any other element (e.g., position, sizing, etc.).

Then, you can animate the Spline scene as you like. You can set the position, rotation, and scale (on all X, Y, and Z axes) of that object in the animation timeline. You can also adjust your action targets to determine which elements or triggers the animation affects.

Using the reference footage and audio clip from the previous post, I started blocking out the basic key poses/ key frames that show the action that I am going to create. By scrubbing through the reference footage I was able to pick out some key frames that show the basic action. I decided to use a rig called Mr buttons because I thought it would be interesting to animate a cartoon character rather than a rig I use all the time. Plus I used the feedback and changed the scissors to a small sword as it was easier to animate with.

Below I moved onto adding some inbetween frames, as I wanted to make sure that I added frames between the main poses, allowing me to create some interesting looking actions/ poses for this animation. I also wanted to make sure my animation was in time with the audio file so that I could lip sync later on.

Continuing on with the animation I have started adding some more inbetween frames for the fingers, where he is showing the pencil and making that magical hand gesture. Plus I am trying to make sure I get the time right for the sword swing as the audio clip is quite quick, so I need to keep working on that.

Here I have started adding the basic Phoneme shapes to the character using a reference image I found online for mouth shapes. By having this as reference I was able to quickly apply the basic mouth shapes for the words and phrases in the dialogue.

Below is my final playblast for the blocking part of the animation, here I have made sure that I have all the key poses and inbetweens I need for the animation, as I do not want parts of the rig to be spinning or moving in random places.

After splining the animation the first time I realised that I had not keyed every part of the control as some of the keys were missing a translate or rotate (X, Y or Z) which made the rig spin and break, which is what I worried about.

Therefore to fix this issue I went back through the animation and made sure I added all the keys into the poses, plus I added a few more frames to make the character move more naturally rather than jolting around.

One of the biggest issues I encountered was the sword and pencil because they kept moving out of the characters hand, or not staying in the same place when it should be. Therefore I had to go through and key frame every frame, just to make sure the sword and pencil stayed in the right place. But working in the graph editor allowed me to fix the issues I had with character spinning and moving around. So I have been working on the hips and feet, making sure the feet stay planted and so the hips do not spin around.

Continuing on with the spline pass I managed to fix a number of issues with the animation, however the character is still moving around a lot and not standing still, so I need to go through and try and fix it.

As you can see below I am still getting one or two frames that are still playing up in the animation. I have tried fixing them in the graph editor but it is still playing up. Therefore I decided to move on and spline the rest of the rig and come back to that issue later. As you can see some of the actions are running quite smoothly, but the character still moves around a lot when talking.

Here I have had to move and leave the issues I have been having because I cannot seem to fix them and I need to get the animation completed. Therefore I polished the hands, eyes, expressions and lip sync to make sure that part of the animation looked nice and smooth. I also added a camera to the animation to show different angles of the character while he is moving or talking.

Taking on the feedback I did my best to fix the issues in the animation, however after I rendered the animation I realised the issues were still there. However this shows that I should spend a little more time on the animation, and not try to rush some of it. Therefore next time I will work more consistently and make sure I fix a issue earlier on in the animation.

So I have this problem when trying to animate this panther, long story short, I never tried to animate anything in maya until now because first I learned to model stuff and to build rigs, so I did that and now I need to learn how to use tools in maya to animate characters, animals etc. Now I know how things are supposed to move in real life, but I am having hard times making my cat move the way she should moves as long as after converting my curves from stepped into splines, the animation breaks, it behaves in a way that I do not expect, even if I try to go in and try to fix it, still not manage to do it the way I want, and if I add more keys it makes my animation looks like it has some kind of lag.

One question before, I watched a course about animating a scene in maya, there was this character doing a swing on a pipe and then landing on a platform, the guy went blocking all the main poses first, and when he convert everything in spline, the animation looks almost perfect, he just made some adjusments, a few in-betweens and that was it, like, why he didn't get the same mess I got?

Personally I always work in spline, I almost never use stepped mode for that reason. I like that I get a result closer to the final animation from the very beginning, rather than the choppy motion of stepped keys.

You should be able to use the spline actor with a path track. Add the object you want to place along the spline actor to sequencer. Click on the +Track for that object and choose the spline actor from the Path submenu. Once you do that, it should automatically create a float track for the Timing Curve. Set keys to indicate 0 - start of the spline, 1 - end of the spline.

I ended up doing what you do in 3D software in general, which is to add a dummy object as a pivot point and parent it to what you want to move along the track. Then whenever you want to add a relative rotation, you just do it to the child, and the spline will still affect the rotation on the parent.

I was having the same issue today. In my case I had a blueprint actor that I wanted to animate along a spline and have it into the sequencer. I managed to fix the wrong rotation by adding an arrow component (or a Child actor could be used as well) as my root for my blueprint (the one that will get the animation path) and make it a parent for my static mesh. Then rotate the static mesh 90 degrees. Now the static mesh has the rotation needed to follow the path fine

My issues were I was trying to call my combo within a BP then on to the level.

YOU MUST in this case Make clear Variable References to the Track(Spline) in the Cart(Actor) -the track has nothing inside this BP besides a Spline component.

Your Moving Actor uses the refence create of the spline to target this specific track right after SpawnActor. You must link your SetRef of Spline From the return value of the spawned spine.

I created a timeline within the Cart to set playrate/speed etc.

if you need help follow Cart and Track videos on uTube.

Hello. I solved it like this.

Points1500607 151 KB

It is important to check the boxes for each vector in the places where I marked.

The animation works fine in the sequencer and in the viewport. But the animation did not work for me when rendering with Movie Render Queue. Could not overcome this bug. Therefore, the task had to be solved differently (baked animation in Maya).

Hey @weignerm did you find a solution for this? Currently facing the same problem: Spline animation of variable sfrom blueprint construction script works in Editor, works in Simulation, but does not animate at all when being rendered.

I have a whale that I am animating using a spline path. It is using an animation blueprint, and has a blendspace as well for its animations. It animates on the path fine, but I was wondering if it is possible to pause the spline animation at a certain point, or time, for a certain number of seconds before having it continue on. Ideally I would have the idle animation playing during this time. I have no idea how to approach this or if it is possible.

Bones chain with no stretch have a maximum lenght, when they are straight, so thats also the maximum distance for your empty when the top of the bone chain have to stay at the same spot like your empty.

A question of priority I think, is you look at my picture, you see something possible.

What I ask is for the ik spline to do his job but with a priority for the top of the chain to stay to the empty.

Occasionally as professional animators we may be called on to fix other animators' work. This is not uncommon during the crunch of production. It is always with some trepidation that I look under the hood of another animator's shot; it's kind of like going into someone else's bathroom. Most of the time it's okay, but once in a while you come across somebody who obviously hasn't bothered to clean up in there in a while, and now I've got to tip-toe around and try to work with this mess. There could be tangent handles shooting off in all directions, keys that were left in held or linear mode, and jagged splines that necessitated counter-animation in other areas to make the animation look smooth. I'm pretty anal-retentive when it comes to splines, so this kind of thing really makes my jaw clench. I'd like to take some time here to go over some basic concepts of spline hygiene, just in case I ever have to fix one of your shots. Practicing basic hygiene can prevent a lot of problems with timing, spacing and arcs, and can give you a head start towards your polish phase. It's also just good manners!

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