How Valve anims? "Inbetweening, splining and offsetting techniques"

[Wolf1366]

I've been watching the Valve tutorials, I've been practicing animation in SFM and I've achieved good results using only the motion editor and using only graph editor, I've seen debates in which it is better but to cheer in a professional way I would like to see if anyone knows how they do
In the demonstrations I see that they use a variety of techniques in which they mention more than just the two that taught in "Pose and pose" series, that would be "posing" and "blocking" but mention others that are "inbetweening", "splining " and "offsetting"
Https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEz7TslI-fs&t=112s

[surfer171]

Inbetweening is where you fill in the blanks between your key poses, basically trying to solve a puzzle to make a smooth transition between key pose A to key pose B and so forth

Splining is a… graph editor term, it's when you animate in stepped tangent or blocking in the graph editor and once you're done, you press number 3 on your keyframes to shift from stepped to spline (correct me forum regulars)

Offsetting… I'm not sure, it's a lot more of a motion editor term where you block your animation and you highlight the area that you blocked and using the mouse wheel, you can tell SFM how to transition from pose A to pose B and how fast will it transition

So… question here is, what's your objective of your question you ask? What I can tell based on the first paragraph, it's all up to your preferences. Some like it motion editor, some like it graph editor (but graph rely a lot on motion editor for smoothing out motions, add a little jitter to said movements).

[Marco Skoll]

Originally posted by surfer171:

Offsetting… I'm not sure

Offsetting, I believe, refers to the "Overlapping Action" concept in the 12 principles of animation.

Completely synchronised motion looks unnatural. The arm doesn't move entirely in time with the head, so slightly offsetting the keyframes for different bones in the right way can produce a more realistic result.

[surfer171]

I don't know, the offsetting term is a lot of the motion editor part, you know, shift mouse wheel and you get the offset thing as explained in the tutorial to create the smooth transition.

@r234, We're looking for you

[Fluid Script Studios]

What Marco said, offsetting in animation terms has to deal with offsetting the movement of multiple body parts. For example, when i move my hand, my collar bone moves first, then followed by my arm, then elbow, and finally my hands, and fingers. All these bones are moving at different times and follow a wave like motion to create realistic movement.



Offset in the editor, is the overlap of key frames on top of already existing curves, without effecting said curves. This is "offset mode."

I believe the mouse-wheel highlight thing is called a falloff region.

[surfer171]

Oh yeah… that was the term that was at the tip of my tongue!

But one thing here that's unclear of is the OP's objective of the thread. Does he wants definition of it or application of it which are the blocking, offsetting and splining in an animation process

[Wolf1366]

Many thanks for the answers, my goal in what was the question was in the way in which Valve towards their animations, I know that the ways of animating vary between preferences when using only motion or graph editor but my question was to know how they Do and not in a preference for comfort, I do not care if I have to use both to get professional results with practice.
If I speak in English (Don't know if i do well, I'm argentinian) but understand certain terms it is difficult for me so I apologize for that, but I want to know if I am well in the steps
1- "Blocking and inbetweening": make the main poses and then poses of transition between them in the motion editor
2- "Splining": Put keyframes in the graph editor in the places of the poses as in the demonstrations in the tutorials and add the "spline tangent" for a smoother movement
3- "Offsetting": Set the speed of the transition including "Slow in, slow out" and cause not all parts of the body to move the same, as the hair moving in the opposite direction in the transition in a movement to look at A side

[surfer171]

You might want to ask them or watch behind the scenes as valve made their SFM videos for meet the team. You can slowly see what editor they use in the said video.