Simplify Animation Curves Tool

[david-cattermole]

Feature

Users wish to simplify an animation curve that may be noisy or bumpy into a less complicated "smoother" animation curve.
Users may also wish to apply these animation curve simplifications to sub-ranges of an animation curve - just a part of the animation curve.

This tool may be similar to the Smooth Keyframes tool, and although this is a similar tool, there would be different methods available, and the goal here is to reduce the amount of detail.

For example, this tool can be seen more as a "curve fitting" tool, that fits a mathematical curve model to the input set of 2D points.

Examples of simplification methods;

• Linear Line
• N-point Uniform Basis-Spline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-spline)
• Smoothing
  • Gaussian smoothing
  • Average smoothing
  • Fourier smoothing

To help with simplifications while maintaining keyframe tangents, we could look at https://github.com/Toolchefs/kiko or https://github.com/Autodesk/animx/ for inspiration.

Expected behavior:

1. Users should be able to select an attribute or animation curve keyframes
2. Run a tool
3. The animation curve will be modified (with undo) with the simplified/smoothed curve values.

User's should then be able to repeat this process, with different attributes or different sections of an animation curve.

Software Versions

• mmSolver version: 0.5.x
• Maya version: All supported
• Operating System (OS): All supported