Hey folks,
I'm re-visiting this again after a few years, because I still never figured out how to deal with this. And now that I'm doing character animations and things with more keyframes simultaneously, it's really becoming an even greater conundrum. Is this possibly scriptable?
The issue is 2 fold. First of all, I just want all linear keyframes (mostly) just because I like dealing with that better, I have my own way of making it look cool. But the way the program works, ALL new keyframes will be the "smooth" setting. If you don't want that you have to change them only after they are recorded. Now you might say I should "just select all and change them", but then if you add more after that you have to change those too. Also, this is where the issue gets worse, if I'm animating a character, there's like 16 heirarchical keyframes that get recorded, and as far as I can tell there's no way to change those to linear all in one shot. You'd have to go to each item and pull out the menu 16 times just to fix one moment.
Also, you may say, 'why don't you like the 'smooth' option'?
I can provide demonstrations if needed, but it has a tendency to make things go backwards before the movement. And from what I can tell, it's impossible for anything to ever stay still if you're using the smooth setting. For example, if you have something move and then stop, stay there for awhile, and then move again, the smooth setting will cause it to do a long gradual dip throughout the part where it's supposed to stay still. Unless you edit keyframes to linear after the fact. (this is what i did for the entirety of the "history of the entire world, i guess" video, which was mildly tolerable because I was only animating 2 objects, but still drove me insane) Looking for a way for them to be linear when they are recorded, not having to change them all afterwards. Or, possibly, and this would help slightly, if there were a way to change them all in one shot across multiple objects, like if a character has 12 joints keyframed at 1 time, a way to change all of those back to linear in one shot.
Every time I google this issue I am taken right back to my own post (this post), and I am perplexed as to why other people are not as troubled by this issue. Using the smooth mode all the time just gives so much unreasonable looking motion, and it's impossible to make anything ever stay still. And using linear requires constantly babysitting the keyframes, because every time you make a new one, it's defaulted to smooth. Luckily I use "cmd-? ta li" which is kind of like a poor man's keyboard shortcut (via the help menu) for something without a keyboard shortcut, but still, having to do it every time is getting insane, which again might be halfway tolerable except now with character animations, having to crawl around and fix it each time for the knee, the arm, the leg, ............. I really don't know what I'm going to do about this one.
I suspect someone may tell me again that I shouldn't be bothered by this, but I'm willing to stick with this until I can understand whether there is actually something that I've missed here. Willing to look into scripting solutions, if I can figure out how.
Thank you so much to anyone who can shed some light on this.
Bill