Animation with no smoothing between keyframes

Question

Most 2D animation software can render the animation 'frame-by-frame'. There are no smooth transitions between each frame, and each frame after is usually blank, and the artist re-draws the scene, a bit different. The last can also sometimes be altered for a new frame. It will be like an animated lego stop-motion like film:

My goal is to be able to have my scene all set in frame one and then duplicate that scene to the next frame to be altered and to not 'smooth' the animation frames.

Question:

Is something like a stop-motion (no actual footage) possible with CGI in Blender? If so, how do I go about creating this environment to animate with?

Answer 1

The default interpolation between keyframes is bézier, which will make smooth motions that start from 0, accelerate and decelerate before stopping or changing direction.

Interpolation can be changed in the curve editor (or the dopesheet editor) to be constant, meaning that there will be no in-between transformation between keyframes: Elements will remain unchanged until the next keyframe.

To change interpolation, select the keyframes, press the T key and select constant.

To change interpolation permanently, open the system preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U), and in the editing section set the interpolation you want to use.

Answer 2

Usually, the animations made in Blender might seem smooth. But they're not! Actually, every animation is like a stop-motion movie: at every frame, something changes a little bit, creating the illusion of movement.

Usually, every frame only takes 1/30 of a second, so you can't actually see individual frames, just motion that appears to be smooth. If you lower the number of frames per second (fps), as other users have suggested, you will start to see individual frames, giving you the blocky-movement effect you seem to be looking for.

In Blender, it is easy to achieve this. In the scene tab of the properties panel, open the Dimensions section. You will see something like this:

Now, under Frame Rate, select "Custom". Since the original fps was 24, we'll divide it by 10 and enter 2. However, the animation will appear too slow, because we've reduced the fps. The solution? We'll re-map the time! Under time remapping, set "New" to 10. This will speed up the animation 10 times, because 100/10 = 10. You also have to divide the start and end frames by 10, or your animation will be too long. So, in our example, we should have this:

Your animation will now look blocky, like stop-motion.

Here is an example:

24 fps (original)

2 fps

In comparison to cegaton's answer, this method has advantages and disadvantages:

• Advantage: this technique will significantly reduce the render time, because every frame is only rendered once, and not 10+ times.
• Advantage: You don't need to worry about individual keyframes, so this method is relatively simpler.
• Disadvantage: you will have no control over the length of individual frames. They will all be the same length (unless you change that in post-processing, which might be tedious.
• Disadvantage: you can't have smooth animation together with blocky animation in one scene.

Answer 3

One option that hasn't been mentioned in the older answers.. There's an f-curve modifier: 'Stepped Interpolation', which can, for example, automatically double-frame animations which have been keyed normally, (and whose tool-tip expressly suggests it is to simulate stop-motion).

If you need to copy the modifier to multiple channels, this answer shows you one method.