4 ways to solve linear rotation issues with Blender and Verge3d – tutorial

The above method…works. If you are solo artist who does not have to your animation worked on by other animators this method will work. In a studio or a situation where there are multiple animators working on the project, this is not good practice.

The additional keyframes between the endpoints can cause a lot of problems during final editing unless the other animators know you are controlling a linear function with multiple keyframes as this is not common. Editors will slide keyframes around to finalize timing with clients and end up running into a situation where they may have to re-key the two inner points depending on how they moved the keyframes around. This just adds extra work and lost profits and worse yet wastes the client’s time. Many times it will cause the final editor to become embarrassed as they have to go through the keyframes to figure it out while the client sits there doing nothing. They just aren’t used to it and not expecting senseless keyframes in the timeline. Needless to say, that editor will put the animator’s name on the list real fast if they get embarrassed. Its almost better to bake each keyframe so the editor can quickly tell you are manually controlling the animation.

However, if you are a solo artists working on a project…yes this will work but its a bad habit if you plan to work professionally as an animator so I would avoid learning it.

In the example, the four keyframes have a linear interpolation and linear animation. You have to be careful to scale the keyframes as a group if you want to change the timing of the animation. If you move one keyframe in the group of four in your timeline the animation changes… it’s still linearly interpolated but no longer a linear animation. You are forced to move other keyframes to a new timeline location to make the animation linear or remove two inner keyframes and add two new keyframes. The problem is compounded if you go from an even number of frames to an odd number of frames or vice versa. When this happens you have to delete the two key frames in the middle and just add two new ones or revert and scale as a group.

The problem again is not related to a person working as a solo artist. The problem is working on this with multiple animators, creative directors, and editors who do and will go back through timelines and make adjustments. In a project with hundreds of linear sequences…this just adds time and complexity that can be easily avoided by not having extra keyframes.