When having the chops lag node and using the overshoot settings, you need a smooth animation to drive it.

For example when using lag/overshoot for car dynamics and the car is already driving at 50kmh from frame 1, the lag/overshoot node shoots back and forth since it sees a huge acceleration from frame 1 to frame 2, whilst you actually dont want it to react to that part yet.

How’d you guys tackle this?

Klonkel

I'd just lay down a channel CHOP, then right click and "Edit data channels," edit to make a nice smooth ease-in from 1-10 or so, and then mult your lag channel by that with a math CHOP.

Sean

I've never played with that part of chops before, whole new world opened up. I sense a wiki post or two coming up...

mrCatfish
I'd just lay down a channel CHOP, then right click and "Edit data channels," edit to make a nice smooth ease-in from 1-10 or so, and then mult your lag channel by that with a math CHOP.

Sean

Thanks for the reply, indeed also for me a new area of chops!

However, in this case you'd first need to make the current position relative to the origin, since otherwise you're going to fade-in/speed-in the animation from the origin to where the actual animation is located?

Apart from making the animation start from the origin, isn't there another way to get a pre-extend which fades in the animation?

Here is a more procedural way. Please middle click on the nodes for explanation.

• Take orig anim make sure to use extend options to interpolate slope.
  
• Create a single channel with a constant value of 1 which starts well before the scene.
  
• Mult the orig channel with this
  
• You have to do this to "harden" the slope created by extending it via the extend CHOP. Otherwise the lag CHOP doesn't see the extended channel.
  
• Your lag will no longer jump.
  

I have also fleshed out yesterday's suggestion... it is a bit more fiddly, but it's a good technique to know.

The only reason I know all this stuff is because I used CHOPs a lot in the early 2000s on a kid's TV show where we re-used a lot of motion clips. And CHOPs is a time-warp that hasn't really changed in over 20 years.

Thanks for the reply and the examples!

I actually couldn't get this idea implemented in my setup since I want it to work with timeslice on, so there's no timeline actually for the chops to be calculated on or extended. I added a scene file in the attachment.

Why do you want timeslice on? Is this just a proof of concept for some much larger setup? Because AFAIK memory savings are the only reason for using it, and in this example it just makes life harder.

Currently the only workaround I can see if you are going to use timeslice is to insert a "record" CHOP after the object CHOP... but then you are probably removing all the benefits of timeslicing.

Sean, thank you so much for the info about the "Edit data channels". I love CHOPs. I lived under the impression, that I could animate the constant (or a channel). I believe I could animate an attribute in SOPs and import the value into a channel. The "Edit data channels" is super useful. Thank you!