Go From Mouse Drag Animation to Keyframes

Report · Feb 17, 2025

Character Animator 25.0, Mac OS 13.6.7 (22G720) Ventura

I will preface this by saying I learned enough of CA 4 years ago in order to animate a client's cartoon logo man. Came out pretty good for a beginner. Now, after having forgotten most of it, I need to add to one of these animations. Imagine an arm that goes up where a basketball ball is added in AE. Now, when the arm gets to the top, I need to animate a slam dunk motion. The orginal animation was me dragging the mouse to move the IK chain up and a little side-to-side motion to imply balancing the ball. I thought I could easily switch to manual keyframing at that moment, but I can't figure out how. I can't see any keyframes in the timeline in the Record tab (not sure if mouse motion shows keyframes anyway), but not sure how to proceed. Videos I've found online show people selecting their puppet, clicking the stopwatch and going from there. Keyframes clearly visible. Not mine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Report · Feb 18, 2025

I don't know what your puppet looks like - is it a whole body or just the arm? The keyframes stop watch is related to a parameter that you can enter, such as position x or position y in Transform. I'm not quite sure how to break down the puppet so the the transfoms are just on the arm nodes. I checked the motion library for a slam dunk motion but that's not in the set. How often does the puppet need to do this?

Report · Mar 07, 2025

Thanks for your reply and sorry for the delay. That animation was canceled and I had to move on. I'll try to come back and post more so I'll know for the future.