Spline Types and Animation

Different spline types will have different tradeoffs and capabilities:

B-splines:

Give automatic continuity control, but only approximate their control points.

Non-uniform B-splines:

Are needed to break continuity.

Non-uniform Rational B-splines (NURBS):

Provide additional local control over the shape of a curve.

Bézier splines:

Require additional information for each segment and do not automatically maintain continuity. However, they do interpolate the ends of segments.

Hermite splines:

Require tangent vectors at each keyframe.

Catmull-Rom splines:

Provide only first derivative continuity.

Beta-splines:

Provide automatic continuity, control over the tangent and approximate arc length of each segment.