Keyframing (or “keying”) is the process of animating values over time. Traditional hand-drawn animation is generally created using keyframes—an animator draws the extreme (or critical) poses at the appropriate frames, creating “snapshots” of movement at specific moments. Keyframes are the cornerstone of convincing animation. The drawings determine what a figure looks like at specific moments in time, the frames chosen for the keyframes determine the timing and weight of a figure, and the number of keyframes can reflect the complexity of the movement.
After the keyframes are drawn, the frames in between
them are added in a filling-in process called in
As in traditional animation, a keyframe in XSI is also a “snapshot” of a movement at a given frame, and is just as important in setting the tone and timing of an animation. However, unlike traditional animation, XSI handles the in-betweening process by using interpolation, which computes the intermediate values between the keyframes.
SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.6.01