Resizing mode for Timeline that doesn't change frames to which Keyframes animate its playhead
One of the things that you can do with a Timeline is to use it as a state machine. Each frame - or group of two or three frames if you want to avoid boundary conditions or make connections on otherwise densely packed gadgets easily visible - represents one state. Transitions to another state can be achieved by using "keep changes" Keyframes to animate the playhead position, and the Keyframes doing that can even be placed on the Timeline itself.
But if it turns out that you need more states than you originally thought, you have to expand the duration of the Timeline, and because values for the playhead tweak are relative to the duration of the Timeline, that causes the state change Keyframes to move the playhead to the wrong state. To fix that, your only option at present is to re-record every state change Keyframe.
It would be useful if the Timeline had a mode in which changing the width of the canvas doesn't change the frame to which any Keyframe animates its playhead. The canvas already has a group of Timeline specific window controls at the left of its title bar, so that might be a good place to put a new control to enable the new resizing mode.
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Ah yes. The cause of this is that the playhead is just a percentage of the way through the timeline--just like the "playhead position" output. The keyframes set it to a percentage of the way through the timeline. So it's more like all the keyframes would have to auto-update. Which would be useful, for sure. But not the default because of how the timeline works under the hood. (So my guess is, such a change is unlikely to be made.)
What I tend to do to control timelines is wire into the bottom of the playhead from the outside. For example, if I have 50 columns, I have a counter (or calc I guess) which gives me the fraction (column number to go to) / (total column count). If I set (colnum to go to) = 3, it'll go to the third column. If I extend the timeline later on to have 56 columns, I can just adjust (total column count) in the counter, and the maths will work out exactly the same.
You could do that with your keyframes too--keep-changes the (colnum to go to) to whatever column you want. Even if you make the timeline a different length and change the (total column count), you still want the same column number, and it'll still work correctly.
Hope this helps.
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What I tend to do to control timelines is wire into the bottom of the playhead from the outside. For example, if I have 50 columns, I have a counter (or calc I guess) which gives me the fraction (column number to go to) / (total column count). If I set (colnum to go to) = 3, it'll go to the third column. If I extend the timeline later on to have 56 columns, I can just adjust (total column count) in the counter, and the maths will work out exactly the same.
Good idea. The two extra gadgets, a Value Slider and a Signal Manipulator - or even one extra gadget, a Calculator, if I only add new states at the end - won't be a problem for what I'm trying to do.
One of the reasons why I thought Mm might be able to make this change is that automatically fixing up Keyframes when you make a change to what they affect is already a thing for scene space transforms - when you move an animated object, the Keyframes are fixed up to be relative to its new position.
And like my suggestion for fixing up animation of the playhead, there would have been a cheap workaround if the Keyframe fix up feature didn't exist - just put it in a group.
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I use a value slider or counter to calculate the playhead position relative to the width of the timeline, so there is a relatively simple work-around. It would be more user-friendly if the playhead input could be changed to accepting either frame numbers or percents like they already do. I like this idea it would save me a lot of time and gadgets
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The counter actually outputs the fraction, also. So that's just one gadget too. :D
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