Today I worked in the graph editor in Blender. While I was doing some of that I realized that the arm wasn't twisting the right way and showing the opposite side of the hand when it was in the 90-degree position. To fix this I went back and made it so instead of just the forearm part of the arm moving it was the entire arm together when moving into the 90-degree angle. Doing this also made the arm move in a much smoother manner as well.
After fixing this mistake I finally moved onto using the graph editor.
In Blender, the graph editor is used for a lot of things such as fixing bugs or kinks in the motion of an animation but also for things such as the speed of an object or the delay it has when it moves. I am using it to help with the speed of the motions and the delays when the arm is switching from positions.
This is what the graph editor looks like. When selecting each point to edit the graph it gives you a lever-type display and by clicking and holding on one side moves that side of the graph up or down which affects the movement in the animation. Each point represents the x,y, or z-axis of whatever part of the arm is selected. There are six because three are for the location and three are for rotation. And each set of six is in the place where the keyframe is in that location. In this screenshot, it shows the keyframes on frames 20, 30 and 50.
The first thing I did was experiment with the graph editor but after getting used to it I decided to first adjust the x-axis for the location of the forearm so that it moves faster towards the 30 frame mark, which helps speed up the animation and makes it look more human.
After that, I wanted to add the animation of the arm going up with the palm facing up so I added them to frame 70 and 80 but then I moved them over to frame 60 and 70 to make it go down faster. The keyframe on frame 60 is a halfway point of the forearm going down and the keyframe on frame 70 is of the arm fully extended down with the palm up. I also made adjustments to the keyframes in these frames on the graph editor by moving the y-axis location node to make the arm go down a bit faster. I also changed the total frame count back to 150 to give me more room for the keyframes to work on the movements of the arm.
This is what the animation looks like so far.
What I'm doing on Monday:
On Monday I'm going to work on adding some more keyframes for the next half of the animation which will be the arm coming back up from palm up to the 90-degree position again to back to palm down. To give myself shortcuts and cut my work time down, I'll be working on just duplicating some of the positions I already have and just putting those in instead of hand animating it again and finding the positions for the arm again. I'll walk more about how I duplicate things on Monday as well.
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