so i'm making an animation i make the character run and i play it, everything is fine, then i move on to the next part where he's wall jumping, it looks good i play the WHOLE animation from the start and now in the running segment he's clipping through the ground even though i never touched the previous frames and when i correct the running the wall jumping is clipping through the wall. it takes HOURS to make a 2 second animation becouse of this, it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME I ANIMATE SOMETHING!!!

There are a couple of ways to handle this issue. First lets say your run cycle is from frame 1 to 120. On Frame 120, before making any changes past 120, make sure to make a key frame for each channel that has any movement from 1-120. Make a exact copy of frame 120 then paste it into 121. What this does is locks down the spline curves so anything after 121 does not affect the frames 1-120. The other way is to use layers. So you have the run from 1-120. Make a copy of frame 120 and go to the next layer and paste in the 120 frame into 120 and use the next layer to make the guy jump the wall. Use Replace on the layers. What this does is make each movement separate but will transition between layers with no jump if you make the start and stop exact copies and use the replace on the layers.

i tried both, the 2 frames on the same layer threw off the timing and the frames from one layer won't copy to the other.

Let's try with pictures and hope this helps.

Above is the start of an animation channel, defualt start at frame 1 and at frame 4 we have a downward movement and frame the end of the downward movements.

At frame 10 I added an extra keyframe to stop the curve from heading downward on frame 8 as I added in frame 21. SO far there are 5 keyframes four I addded and the defualt one at frame 1.

Notice when I add in key frame 22 the line drops lower between frame 12 and 20.

I can stop this by putting in keyframes at 19 and 20, see above. You do this by clicking on the red graph line on frames 20 and 19 before putting in key frame 22. What that does is puts in the value at the moment the time line is at, and as long as you do not chage the value the curve will remain as it is. However notice what happens when I place another key frame at frame 43. The graph jumps up to peak at frame 28 before heading to where we want it. This is what causes jumping and what putting in the extra key frames help suppress. You can minimize it by placing a key frame at 23, however that starts to add up a lot of keyframes. Look at image 5 below.

Here I removed the extra key frames 19 and 20. and created another layer that starts to frame 21 and ends at frame 40. It is set to replace mode.

At this point I selected the channel, body part, or body that I want to copy and used ctrl C on the base layer. Select the new layer and select the same channel,body part or body that you did the ctrl C on and do a ctrl V on the same frame. Next two pioctures.

ctrl C

ctrl V

Add in the one extra key frame at end of the layer and now the curve will follow that curve during the layers run duration

will add the extra picture in the next post

Here is the final picture that show the two key frames that make the downward movement and notice the BLACK line between frames 1 to 20 show what the BASE layer will do and the RED line (also BLACK) shows what the new layer will add to the movment. At the end of the new layer the BASE layer will take over and continue with the BLACK line.

The most important thing to remember is that the Spline tool will go through all the points on the line. So if the keys are close together and are not evenly spaced or a have a wide range of movement it will cause the spline to swing in large manner. It is always the best thing to do animations is to use the graph editor so you can see the changes and where the over-shoots are and try to correct before going to far down the editing path.