Timeliner - A Standalone Desktop Editor for VamTimeline
Tired of the slow, cumbersome process of editing dozens of animation clips inside VaM? Do you have a large library of Timeline animations that has become difficult to manage?Master has forged a new instrument. Timeliner is a standalone Windows application designed to solve these problems. It gives you the power to edit, organize, and manipulate your VamTimeline animation files with the speed and precision of a desktop interface. Take full control of your animations before you even launch VAM.
Why Use Timeliner?
The VamTimeline plugin by AcidBubbles is incredibly powerful, but as your projects grow, managing everything in VaM can become a bottleneck. Timeliner streamlines your workflow by offering:- Speed: Use your mouse and keyboard for rapid editing, renaming, and organization.
- Clarity: A hierarchical tree view gives you a clear overview of your entire animation structure, even in complex scenes with multiple atoms.
- Power: Perform complex operations like merging layers, batch renaming, and moving clips between segments, which are difficult or impossible to do in-game.
- Safety: Edit your files in a controlled environment. By using "Save As", you can experiment without fear of overwriting or corrupting your original scene files.
Key Features
Timeliner is packed with features designed to make your life easier.File Management
- Load Both Scene and Animation Files: Open a complete scene (.json) and Timeliner will automatically find the Timeline plugin data, or load a standalone animation file exported from the plugin.
- Intelligent Saving: When you save, Timeliner preserves the original file structure. It will update the animation data within a scene or save a standalone animation file, without altering any other data.
- Merge Animation Files: Merge a separate animation file into your currently loaded project. Timeliner provides smart conflict resolution (Rename, Replace, or Skip) for clips with duplicate names.
Organization & Editing
- Full Tree View: View all your clips organized by Segment -> Layer -> Clip.
- Intuitive Drag & Drop:
- Reorder Clips: Drag clips within a layer to change their playback order.
- Move & Copy Clips: Move clips to different layers or segments. Hold Ctrl while dragging to create a copy.
- Merge Layers: Drag one layer onto another to merge them! Timeliner intelligently combines their animation targets, adding placeholder keyframes to ensure all clips in the new layer function correctly.
- Rename Anything: Simply double-click or press F2 on any item (Clip, Layer, or Segment) to rename it.
- Batch Rename: Select multiple clips and use the Batch Rename tool to quickly find/replace text or add a prefix/suffix to all of them.
- Duplicate & Delete: Easily duplicate a selected clip or delete multiple clips, layers, or even entire segments with a single keypress.
Advanced Animation Tools
- Center Root on First Frame: Fix animations that don't start at the world origin! This powerful one-click tool calculates the X/Z offset of the root controller on the first frame and applies a counter-offset to all position keyframes in the selected clips.
- Move by Offset: Manually apply a precise X, Y, Z offset to the position keyframes of selected clips.
- Properties Inspector: Select a clip to see its core properties, such as length, loop status, and a list of all its animation targets (controllers and float params).
How to Use
- Download the ZIP file from my Patreon site
- Extract the contents to any folder on your computer.
- Run Timeliner.exe.
- Go to File -> Open... and select your animation export .json.
- Edit and organize your animations.
- Go to File -> Save As... to save your changes to a new file. It is highly recommended to save as a new file to avoid any risk to your original work.
IMPORTANT: Requirements & Credits
- This is NOT a VAM plugin. It is a standalone Windows application that edits the data files used by a plugin.
- You MUST have the VamTimeline plugin by AcidBubbles to use the animations in VAM. This tool only edits the files; it does not provide the in-game functionality.
- All credit for the incredible in-game animation system and the keyframe encoding logic goes to AcidBubbles. Please support his work!
- Find VamTimeline on Acid's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidbubbles
