I have an 11 frame walking cycle that I have been trying to get to loop for the past 2 days. I’ve checked the manual etc. It has 22 elements, that are rigged, and attached to a peg. Amongst the things I’ve tried to make this cycle work is: collapsed all the elements under the peg, then right clicked on the last element and selected Change Loops. The result on all the different ways I’ve tried is always the same. The last element is repeated to fill in the number of frames.
I am sure I’m justing doing something stupid, so if anyone could help me, I sure would appreciate it. Thanks F
You’re sure not the first person to struggle with that…Took me a while to get it through my own thick skull, so you’ll probably get it right quick.
It’s almost counter-intuitive. So put your intuition on the counter for a few.
The first frame and the last frame have to have the same values on the pegs. That’s so it restarts itself. So if you want a 16 frame loop, you have to have 17 frames to account for a return to the values in the first set of keyframes.
Try it with a simple cycle like a ball bouncing up and down. I figured this one out while preparing to demo Toon Boom at a conference a while back, and not a minute too soon.
I have never been comfortable using the peg looping functionality. There is a trick to it but I use it so infrequently I always keep forgetting how it works. Here is an alternate method that should solve your problem. You have your elements all rigged and animated with keyframes and attached to a main peg. So all you need to do is collapse the main peg and select all 16 of your frames that make up your cycle and use the copy command. Then move the red frame slider to frame 17, which is the next frame after the end of your cycle and use the paste special command. Be sure you have all the blocks checked in the paste special dialog except “create additional keyframes at beginning and end of selection”, “overwrite existing drawings” and “update colors” as you don’t need those for your purposes here. This paste special will give you a full repeat of your cycle that you copied. If you want additional loops just go to the next frame past the end of the previous loop and paste special again etc. for as many repeat loops of your cycle as you want. -JK