From the course: Cinema 4D S22 Essential Training: Motion Graphics

Copying tracks and offsetting keyframes - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D S22 Essential Training: Motion Graphics

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Copying tracks and offsetting keyframes

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- [Instructor] You can copy animation tracks from one object to another, which means if you have objects which share properties, you can set up an animation once and then copy it to other objects. This is another useful time-saving technique. So what I've done in this scene is taken an example from a previous movie and I've broken it out so that we have the individual letters of this word bounce. So now only the B has animation on it. And so what we're going to do is take the animation on the B, apply it to each letter and then offset the animation to create a more interesting looking animation overall. First things first, we're going to select the B, and you can see in the coordinates tab that we have key frames on the Y position and the pitch rotation. So first I'm going to select the Y position and right click and choose animation, copy track. Next I'm going to do a big marquee selection around all the other extrude objects and in that Y position property, and see you've got them all selected. I'm going to right click and choose animation, paste track. Now it's important that we're at the beginning of the timeline here, which we are. Just note that. Now coming back onto the B, I'm going to click on the pitch, right click, choose animation, copy track. Same thing again, marquee select, right click, animation, paste track. If we play through this now, everything's just happening at the same time. We're pretty much back to where we were in the previous example where we made this text bounce. The real power of this technique is present when we come into the timeline. So I'll press Shift + F3 to bring up the timeline. And then what we can do is click onto the object here. And this will highlight all those key frames. And we can then just click at the bar at the top where it's orange and just move these over. So we can offset the positioning of these key frames, and you can do this however you like. I'm doing it in a fairly random way. And then I'm going to close down the timeline and rewind and just press play. So this is the final effect of just a few moments of playing around offsetting those key frames and it's way more interesting than before. And feel free to spend a bit more time working on them. We've copied an animation track from one object onto other objects which share the same properties. We then offset the key frames in the timeline to achieve a more pleasing result.

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