Answered Timeline: Why does an animation play differently when there were no changes made?

[g1000]

I'm new to this so there are certainly things I don't understand about how VAM deals with physics. I have a short animation that will play out differently on a replay, even though I have made no changes. Example: Flaccid shaft lands left instead of right, so now the model won't pick it up because it's not in the same position it was originally. Sometimes I have to restart the animation several times before it will play out the way I intended/created it to play.

Is there any way to "freeze/save" an animation it so that it will play the same way every time?

Thank you much for any info/help

 

[Acid Bubbles]

This is one of the "less cool" things about using a physics engine to do animation. Every playback is a simulation, so you'll always get small differences. You can increase the spring strength for hands for example, so they follow the control node more closely, and make movements that maximize your chances of success, but there's no "perfect" way to get a perfect playback. There are some plugins that will also automatically adjust on the fly, like ClockwiseSilver plugins for example.

 

[g1000]

Thanks – I had a feeling it might be something like that. It’s actually not that much of a bummer to me because the physics are pretty cool IMHO. When I first opened a scene with Timeline I had not even posed a model yet – I just installed the app downloaded a bunch of plugins and opened a scene with Timeline intending to animate.. When I selected my first controller I thought – “ouch” this is going to be tough and take forever to do what I had in mind, but it really wasn’t.

Getting things into the positions I wanted was easier than expected and the default “tweening/smoothing” was more natural than I thought it would be. I’m guessing this is due to the physics of the rig and I also noticed there were some plugins that installed by default that may have helped.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Yeah, where this starts being a problem is for, ahem, alignment