Still animating the moose .... progress is slow. Haven't decided what to do about graphics card, so for now I'm still animating frame-by-frame with the help of hand written exposure sheets, capturing the frames then dumping them into a premiere file where I can preview with the sound track.

Today's lesson though is about having too many keyframes! The two items that the moose holds and drops and in the case of the phone, he picks up, holds, then drops have proved to be difficult to animate. I'm trying with pose constraints. In the case of the phone, I've animated the blend weight of the constraint to be at zero to begin, then at 1 when the moose picks up the phone and back to zero when he drops it as he dies. (Originally I had animated the active parameter but this did not work .. the timing was wrong... see previous blog). After switching to animating the blend weight, I noticed that the phone was floating/moving on the floor before the moose picked it up. When I investigated in the animation editor, the curves were set to spline so I switched to linear but the phone still moved, even though I confirmed the keyframe values were the same at zero as they were at frame 1200 when the moose picks the phone up and the blend weight of the pose constraint switches to 1. The phone wasn't moving a lot but it was moving ... since I had duplicate key frames at frame 1199, I deleted the keyframes that were at frame 0. This fixed the problem ... a good thing to know!