VaM 1.x Need help with non-looping Timeline animation

[AlphaCentauri]

Apologize in advance if my terminology is off, first time learning animation here. I have an animation I'd like to make (in learning Timeline) and it has 11 poses that define the beginning to end. What I'm struggling with is that even with "Do Not Loop" turned on it wants to add a keyframe at the end that is a copy of the first keyframe. Not only does this force me to have a longer animation than needed (e.g. going to 6.6s for only 10 pose transitions instead of 6.0s) but it then tries to move from the end pose to the first which makes no physical sense for the motion. How do I setup the animation so it is a "one shot" and just starts at pose A and ends at pose B without going anywhere else? I've attached a video that I hope illustrates my problem. Thanks a bunch.

EDIT: Ok, of course as I post this I figure it out. It copied the starting keyframe to the end by default but I can select it and update the targets on that frame so it doesn't need to go back to where it started and I can shorten to my desired 6.0 seconds from 6.6 seconds (just doing 0.6 seconds for each pose and planning to add additional helper frames in between if things get tied up).

 

[hazmhox]

You cannot consider an animation like a "start to end" thing. You need to understand that an animation can swap to any other animation either mid way through or at the end (depending on the configuration of the anim set).
You're not in a "offline" software (like Blender), the logic of Timeline originally was to loop animations.

So for your case, if you want to end to a specific pose, you will need to have an exit animation.
Or in the case of your video, this NOT an animation, this is what is called a "transitional animation", this should be played against two other animations :

1. Your initial animation ( which should be somewhat similar as your transitional animation )
2. You target animation ( which will start from the end point of the transitional animation )

In the case of your amazon position, this obviously means that ANY animation transitioning into your final position, should have a transitional made for it.
If you prefer, let's imagine you have :

• Missionary
• Doggy
• Cowgirl

Then you'd need :

• Missionary to Amazon
• Doggy to Amazon
• Cowgirl to amazon

And yes, obviously, before you go into that answer...

Yes transitioning is a lot of work and can exponentially ask for transitional animation if you hope to give the player the ability to transition to anything.
Mostly why in my scenes or my collabs, we do fade to black transitions for biggest positions. And most transitional systems are generally the big introduction or the big ending... to avoid an insane amount of work just to let the player change any pose from any other pose.

 

[yasparukko]

You just need to copy all frames from 6:00 to the last frame, 6:60, but do not toggle from non-looping to looping and back to non-looping, or you will have to redo it
When you toggle between non-looping to looping and back to non-looping, first frame gets copied as the last frame

 

[SlimerJSpud]

The Infinite Dance Motions scene has multiple animations, with transitions. That's a good example of pose transitions.

 

[AlphaCentauri]

You cannot consider an animation like a "start to end" thing. You need to understand that an animation can swap to any other animation either mid way through or at the end (depending on the configuration of the anim set).
You're not in a "offline" software (like Blender), the logic of Timeline originally was to loop animations.

So for your case, if you want to end to a specific pose, you will need to have an exit animation.
Or in the case of your video, this NOT an animation, this is what is called a "transitional animation", this should be played against two other animations :

1. Your initial animation ( which should be somewhat similar as your transitional animation )
2. You target animation ( which will start from the end point of the transitional animation )

In the case of your amazon position, this obviously means that ANY animation transitioning into your final position, should have a transitional made for it.
If you prefer, let's imagine you have :

• Missionary
• Doggy
• Cowgirl

Then you'd need :

• Missionary to Amazon
• Doggy to Amazon
• Cowgirl to amazon

And yes, obviously, before you go into that answer...

Yes transitioning is a lot of work and can exponentially ask for transitional animation if you hope to give the player the ability to transition to anything.
Mostly why in my scenes or my collabs, we do fade to black transitions for biggest positions. And most transitional systems are generally the big introduction or the big ending... to avoid an insane amount of work just to let the player change any pose from any other pose.

Thank you - I'm working on that part (as it relates to learning) and this helps I think. As those examples you gave (missionary, doggy, cowgirl) would be loops in my use, would you put those on a different sequence or in the same sequence as the transition animation? Still wrapping my head around animation vs. sequence vs. layer.

 

[hazmhox]

Thank you - I'm working on that part (as it relates to learning) and this helps I think. As those examples you gave (missionary, doggy, cowgirl) would be loops in my use, would you put those on a different sequence or in the same sequence as the transition animation? Still wrapping my head around animation vs. sequence vs. layer.

I can help you with that ^^

• "Sequence" is the highest type of "object" in timeline, you can start a sequence directly... it's not fundamentally an animation, it's a "group" containing animations
• "Animation" is the lowest type of "object" in timeline. You can call an animation directly like a sequence.
• "Layer" is not tied to starting an animation, it's a way of splitting your controls (either the control nodes, or floats) to have a finer control over your animation.

Let me give you more direct example for sequence and animations so that it's easier to understand, you can structure your content like this in timeline :

• Sequence01 ( a sequence )
  • Loop01 (an animation)
  • Loop02 (an animation)
  • Loop03 (an animation)
• Sequence02 ( a sequence )
  • Loop01 (an animation)
  • Loop02 (an animation)
  • Loop03 (an animation)

In your scene, you can then have 5 buttons :

• Play Sequence 01
• Play Sequence 02
• Play Loop 01
• Play Loop 02
• Play Loop 03

When you click "Play Sequence X", timeline will start the sequence (it starts at the first animation, so Loop 01 will start)
When you click "Play Loop X", timeline will play the animation INSIDE of the sequence it's currently in.
So if you click first "Play Sequence 02", clicking afterwards "Play Loop 03", will play Loop03 contained in Sequence02 sequence.

This if a way for you to organize your sequences and reduce the amount of button (or scripts) you would need to control the flow of a sequence.
You could for instance, drive the start of "Sequence 01/02" through a story telling mechanism (so no user interaction) and have a single panel to control all sub animation as long as you preserve the same names for the animations contained in the sequences.


And the example for the layers, imagine having these layers and controls :

• Main Layer
  • headControl
  • chestControl
• Thrust Layer
  • hipControl

You could create then an animation for the main layer, let's say "Cowgirl", with a duration of 1 min, which would be the detail animation of the character's head and chest moving.
You could then have the "Cowgirl" animation in the thrust layer, with a duration of 2secs, which would be the simple thrust animation of the character's hip.

This way, you can focus on detailing the main layer over 1 minute. And simply refining and doing a basic loop for the thrust layer.

This is a very basic example, but with more advanced configurations, you can control groups for anims (if you name anims like this: MyGroup/MyAnimName) which would allow randomization and so on. That might be a bit complicated tho for now if you're only starting ^^


And finally, for your question: I generally consider "sex positions" as a sequence, like a story driven animation would also be a standalone sequence. You can transition to anything from a specific animation, so you could get out of let's say the "Cowgirl sequence" with a transition contained in that sequence, to move into another sequence, let's say "Amazon sequence".

And even if you had some limitation, timeline can contain a trigger track, so you can trick it into moving somewhere that the plugin would not allow (which, honestly is not the case I think) by triggering a specific animation/sequence playback at some point in your timeline.