What are some of your tips for animating spins in the sequencer?

Development Character & Animation
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(tldr: how to make spinning character animations for things like attacks, dances, etc?)

Sorry for the long post!
My current obstacle is creating an animation where a character (or maybe an object) spins around, and I was hoping there were animators or game devs (indie or not) that have this problem of mine figured out! If someone can offer advice, or point me to a resource that helped them with a similar problem, I would a appreciate it.

I’ve tried a few different ideas, but nothing seems to be working for me, or it ends up feeling needlessly complicated so I’m sure I’m missing some kind of tool or method to simplify things!

As far as things I’ve tried:
-Tried creating a few poses for the start, anticipation, main part of anim, then ending, then fixing up the in betweens (my issue with this is that it felt complicated to make it smooth, especially if there was any offset, like the character weight shifting through the movement. I may try this again and try using I/FK switching again since I may not have been using it correctly.)

-Spinning the body offset (the issue was that the feet/hands wouldn’t stay where I needed them, even when using the pivot tool, usually I just ended up with the character spinning while the feet slid on the ground in perfect circle)

-putting the pivot point in world space, then spinning the body offset and the pivot the same amount. (I feel like this is the closest, but I’m having trouble getting the body where I want it to be. Below is just an example before I tried messing with the body, so I feel like this might get pretty close.)

-using the snapper and constraints with a cube so that way I could constrain the pivot point’s rotation (I tried to so something like in this UE Fest 24 video, but it may just be the incorrect solution

I was interested in using this guy’s video for reference from like 1:13-1:18. Maybe minus the flipping.
There’s also this mixamo animation that’s similar to what I want, but I would prefer to learn how do create one on my own. I only edited it a little to make it lower to the ground and less jittery.

Sorry for the long post! I have been trying unsuccessfully for a while and searching online hasn’t given me much help. I tried a bunch of difference searches on these forums, youtube, and reddit.

Thank you in advance for your time and help!

2

Finally figured out how to get the solution I’ve been trying for! This problem might be niche, but if anyone else is trying to do this, I’ll share what I’ve found.
(It may or may not actually be that helpful though sooooo we’ll see)

The goal was to get a part of the rig to be anchors in one place.

  • Drag a cube into the sequencer and scale it to a manageable size, (around .09 for me was fine)
  • Use the snapper to set the cube to the correct position. It will be the anchor point!
  • select cube in sequencer> put as child in snapper
  • select the bone you want in viewport or sequencer> set as Parent
  • uncheck “Keep Offset” and “snap scale,” check “snap position” and “snap rotation”
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    (I also ended up dragging the cube forward, checking keep offset, and snapping animation a second time, but I don’t think it really matters unless you’re gonna use “look at constraint”)
  • Select the desired bone and add constraint > use dropper to select cube (need two constraints, one for translation and one for rotation)

    Now I can move the body offset around and the foot will stay where I want it!

Since I want to rotate my character, I will also select the cube and use a rotation constraint on the body offset control so when I rotate that, the cube rotates based on the movement of the body offset, and the foot bone will rotate based on the movement of the cube.


Now it’s significantly less janky. I mostly want to write these steps in case I forgot about them in the future.

If someone else has a better way to anchor points like this, I’d be happy to learn about it!