Topic: [blender] keyframing custom properties?

[ratty redemption]

hi guys, i'm having problems with keyframing some custom property sliders, which via drivers affect the influence sliders of some actions strips. ie i'm trying to use custom properties in the 3d view to blend different actions in the nla editor. if you look at this screen capture, your'll see the graph editor curves are meant to be smooth bezier curves, but currently mine are stepped, resulting in the animation blending stuttering when played back.



is there a way to smooth them out?

i tried setting their interpolation type to bezier, which gave a slight curve as opposed to linear graphs, but they always seem to end up stepped. the reason i have my custom property sliders set to 20 increments, is because that was a comfortable amount of distance i would need to drag the sliders, but also i didn't just want the drivers to instantly switch their target's influence between 0 and 1.

[kat]

It looks like there's something keyed at the bottom and top of each step. What do you see when you zoom in to one of the steps? You may also need to edit the beziers manually to reset them and get rid of the hard corners (there should be a smooth option but that might alter the frames rather then smoothing the curve).

[ratty redemption]

thanks kat, and i've just checked, there are no keyframes on those curves between frame 1-167, and i only got as far as frame 251, also those curves have no modifiers on them.

could this be a bug?

[kat]

Only thing I can suggest is trawl through bug tracker and Blender Artists see if you can find anything similar.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Animation/Editors/Ipo/Editing/Curves
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Animation/Editors/Graph/FCurves

[ratty redemption]

thanks kat, i'll have another look at the wiki pages you linked to, as i haven't checked those in a while, but this is the first time i've seen curves like that in blender, unless a stepped modifier was applied.

[ratty redemption]

if i copy one of those stepped looking custom property curves, and paste it into an object's transform, the curve gets automatically converted to a bezier, so i imagine custom properties only use whole numbers/integers... i'm not at all good at maths so could misunderstanding this.

[kat]

So when you copy/paste, the result is a smoother line as you would normally expect of a bezier? If that's the case then yes, there's something causing issues with the custom property you've set; ordinarily I'd say it looks like something is editing the curve but if you say there are no bezier or curve points at those kinks that would otherwise do that I've no idea what might be causing it. Very puzzling.

[ratty redemption]

yes, the copy/paste from the original key framed custom property slider results in a smooth bezier. it's as if blender knows that the keys come from one of those sliders and not an object's transform. likewise if i replace the slider's stepped curve with one from a transform then it also becomes stepped.

so i'm slowly piecing this puzzle together, but i don't understand why those sliders only appear to work with integers, while a transform's slider can use float numbers?

which when the latter is used as an input for a driver produces the desired results, i just don't want to drag around 3d sliders in the sometimes cluttered 3d view, if i can have a neater looking properties panel of sliders.

[ratty redemption]

this is looking more like a bug in my opinion.

if i load up a default scene and create a custom property on the cube (without editing the custom property) then it does output a bezier. but if i edit the "prop" with a min of 1 and a max of 20, then replace the keyframes it converts it to integers, well it's curve is stepped and no longer a bezier, even though the graph editor still says the interpolation type is bezier.

i've reported this to the tracker.

[ratty redemption]

sorry i forgot to update this, it was eventually confirmed to be a bug which they fixed.