A question about mdlvis animation persistent frames

[ArcboundX]

Hello there, new to mdlvis animation but i've learnt a lot during the last month, so far mdlvis hasn't given me any issue or hasn't given places to any question i couldn't answer, except the following:

Recently i imported a Beastmaster "Walk" animation into a custom model i'm working on, however said animation showed up very buggy, in the sense that while the legs would somewhat move as the original Beastmaster "Walk" animation, the arms will get deformed and their bones go crazy (my custom model has a chain-like weapon in each hand composed of a lot of bones) so i'm in the middle of fixing each keyframe one by one to mainly return the model's arms to a normal position, however when i just started, i managed to somehow fix the positioning of several of these bones in a single frame, and the change applied to all keyframes.
Being able to replicate this would save me a lot of time, since i'd like to fine tune these changes i made before and re-apply them to all frames again, however i havn't been able to do so.

How can i apply a change to several keyframes at once? for example, tilting the head of my model to the left, and have this change apply to all pre-existing keyframes?

Thanks in advance

 

[PROXY]

As far as I know, that is not possible in mdlvis.

 

[ArcboundX]

If that's the case, what program could i use to do this?

 

[n00b]

oh shittttt i've always been curious about this but i never bothered looking into it.i'm not gonna claim to have any expertise on this topic but here's what i found out in like an hour l0l

so basically each bone has a 'controller' in which you can translate/rotate/scale the selected bone independently from other bones

you can do this by picking the bone u wanna change, then on the pane thingy to the right you click move/rotate/scale (whichever you want to change). when you do that a controller section might appear. if it doesn't appear then there isn't a controller and you have to make it yourself (just keep reading it's ez)

so if for whatever reason you wanna make the head big as fuck for all keyframes of an animation you need to first create a controller that controls the scaling of the head. you do this like so:
1. select the head bone
2. click the scale button
3. make a keyframe and just change the head's scaling. you can do this anywhere within the animation, doesn't matter. this will automatically create a controller for the scaling of the head
4. reselect the scale button and you'll notice a controller for the head scaling appears
5. go to the controller section and click the "highlight KF" checkbox (if it isn't already)
6. when u pick highlight KF you'll notice that in the animation timeline thingy at the bottom (idk the terminology lol) there aren't any keyframes EXCEPT the one that you just made. this is because this timeline only contains keyframes that'll only affect the scaling of the head. deselecting highlight KF will show all the framez again

hope this explanation isn't confusing as fuck because i only just learned of this feature until now. mfw i've been using mdlvis for years and i'm only figuring out this feature exists, it's pretty danm useful

 

[Razorclaw_X]

This won't fix everything, but you can save yourself a lot of trouble by making sure all the keyframes at the start of the animation are the same as at the end of the animation.

You can copy all the keyframes at a particular interval by selecting a part of the track, press 'c' to copy, and then Control-V to paste it wherever (yes, this is kind of confusing). The way Warcraft 3 likes it you want to copy the start and paste it to the end, and to make sure they're the same paste it on the start to generate any keyframes that don't happen to exist at the start.

Mdlvis can trip up when a bone has no keyframe data at all at a particular point so it will try to reference the nearest one, even if it's not part of the animation. This way, you can force a neutral keyframe if one doesn't exist.

There are a lot of Blizzard animations where bones are flat out missing keyframes at certain points and that's why Mdlvis trips up sometimes. Warcraft 3 handles it by assuming the bone is neutral, but Mdlvis doesn't.