Plugins Timeline

[Lione]

I am having Issues with Timeline and Cloth Grab Spheres. Could it be that Timeline is incompatible using Cloth Grab Spheres?
Whenever i physic link a Hand left or right to a Cloth Grab Sphere Timeline no longer animates the Hands movements and does not even set a marker.

My Workflow has been

- Female with Skirt Scene or Pantie Scene.
- Move Hand(s) to Skirt Position or Pantie.
- Add Cloth Grab Sphere(s) to Skirt Position
- Physic Link Hand(s) to Cloth Grab Sphere / When i move the Sphere Arrow or hands with the mouse the Skirt now moves upwards as it should.
- In Timeline set to 1 Minute time.
- Set Cursor to 10 Sec
- Move hand(s) upwards in the Skirt example or downwards in the Pantie example.

Nothing happens not even a marker is set then in timeline although i grabbed the right hand and moved it.
As if the hand(s) would no longer exist.

Why is that ?

If i remove the Sphere it works again.

Also people tell me i need to set a Trigger in Timeline to animate undressing of a Pantie or Skirt ?
For what if i just want to animate the undressing automatical ?

But where in Timeline do i have to add a Trigger and what do i have to select for a Pantie or as my example Skirt upwards movement with a cloth grab Sphere?

There is no undressing animation guide ( why actually ? ) and i do not even get a reply in my help undressing Thread from other Scene Creators which is really not good again to be honest.

How to animate: Pantie Undressing Standing Postion

Animation Worklow Request How can you animate a Female or male undressing their panties? Like this or from front side. Are there and Plugins doing this accurate or any free or pay Undressing Mocap Animations i could use for this ? I guess its more complex than than my previous Animation...

hub.virtamate.com

This really feels like a Paranormal Activity Situation again for me.
Can you help me perhaps to unblairwitch this ?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

I don't have paranormal powers, but I can try and untangle this I see absolutely no reasons there would be any kind of incompatibility (I've seen it done before by Syrinxo and others). The trigger is just the _mean_ of launching the animation, it shouldn't matter either.

The only thing I'm not sure about is:

> Nothing happens not even a marker is set then in timeline although i grabbed the right hand and moved it.

You should be able to create a keyframe yourself by clicking on the "rHand" toggle on the right here (if you did add the hand to the list of targets), but if it didn't add it automatically, something might be wrong (old version of VaM or Timeline? Errors?)

 

[Lione]

Hi thx

I have copied AcidBubbles.Timeline.223.var from your Download

So from Setting up this Environment you attach a Sim Clothing to a person like a skirt or Pantie and set SIM and Undress on .

Then you create a Sphere

You now

- Move Hand(s) to Skirt Position or Pantie
- Add Cloth Grab Sphere(s) to Skirt Position which is a pain in Desktop since of the missing 3D. So that needs some Time moving around.

Phys Link right Hand to Sphere as i have been told to do this by DJ in my Thread as seen here.

No clue why but to let the Sphere check it should be bound with the cloth and Hand you now have to one time deactivate it and reacativate it.

And care the Sphere collision Trigger is also on

If everything is set correct once you now move the Sphere Arrow the clothing moves
up or down incl the Hand(s).

This Step is a entire mess to be honest and from 5 trials 3 do not work to link all together until you repeat the Sphere On Off or again Link the Sphere since even the rH Sphere Link in the Hands Settings is just removed / deleted if you check back the RHand Settings there.
In my Opinion the Hands to Cloth Grab Sphere LINK workflow is bug fested.

Perhaps you have luck and it works from scratch at yours.

In Timeline:

If you now

- add a right Hand Target in Timeline and Set Cursor to 10 Sec
- Move the Sphere Arrow up ( Sphere + clothing and Hands move together ) and release it.

Animation no longer works . There is no Keyframe Set as expected.

It looks like this ( expected 2nd Keyframe )

Also noticed If you click above "rHAND" Checkbox as seen in the Screenshot a manual keyframe is set but with no effect either.
Its even worse the Hand ( no matter if Keyframe 2 is set or not set ) stays in that Position even if Keyframe 1 has been set as a Hands Downwards Position.
It is wiped with Keyframe 2 Information although no Keyframe has been set.

---


This now has nothing to do with the Undressing workflow but is a identical side effect i realized.

- if you now move the right hand ( still physic linked with the Sphere of course ) alone in a kinda useful Position like from sides the Hand moves up ( no Undressing visable now ) and here now a keyframe is set.
But the first keyframe is no longer working and seems to be replaced with the 2nd so the Hands up position will stay if you play the anim

If i click STOP the Hand should move down again since thia has been Pos 1, but nope.
This is similar to the Sphere Arrow moving undressing workflow above.
Keyframe one Information is just gone.

I am sure the Issue here is in the Sphere Physic Link which removes the Hands for Timeline or makes them invisible so Timeline no longer detects the Hands
which seem to be now "Spheres" . And something is messing up Timeline now even if you just move the Hands or add a manual keyframe in checking the RH Box while the Hand(s) are physic linked to a Cloth Grab Sphere.

Now i am lost and either the Link Process is wrong ( perhaps the Sphere itself needs again a "reverse" Link Setting so Timeline will detect the Hands again although linked. But the Sphere itself has no Phys Link to Hand either.
And Timeline has no Grab Sphere in the List to add that instead of right Hands now which i am sure would work to animate it again if the Sphere is moving the Hand incl Cloth up or down.

And there are no errors i have seen.
And i also tried it with a clean VAM now which has same behavior.

Once i remove the Cloth Grab Sphere the Timeline Hands Animation works again.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@Lione I stil have to read through your whole post, but I expected that you'd parent the cloth grab sphere to the hand, not the other way around (otherwise the hand will be animated _relative to the sphere_, which means as you move the sphere the hand doesn't move, ergo no keyframes

For the rest I'll get back to you when I have time!

 

[Lione]

Hi thx that you will have a look at this.
I cannot parent the Cloth Grab Spehere to the hand .
It only offers "Person" + others non Hand
And if i Parent to person the Arm behaves really strange then.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@Lione ah yeah you need to select the "Link To Atom" to Person#2 and "Link To" to rhand, and choose Physics Parent on the position/rotation checkboxes; not the Parent Atom option.

The first option (parent atom) will literally make one atom a part of the other, what you want is "Link To" which doesn't parent the atom itself, but parents the controls.

 

[Lione]

 

[ajtrader23]

I have the strangest problem. I can't select keyframes or edit them. But if I add the plugin a second time, I can edit it from there. Nothing seems to make sense.

I do have UI buttons connecting to it. Help appreciated.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

There are multiple possibilities. The plugin might be locked (more, options), there may be an error (look in the Error Log panel), the animation may be playing, you could have an old version of VaM. If you have a scene JSON, I can take a look

 

[vamurai]

I looked through this thread and others like it and just couldn't come up with an answer, so regretfully, it's time to ask tech support!

I'm having some trouble getting animations to load consecutively. I've bumped into this in the past, and I employed a workaround, but now that I am doing some more complex stuff, I don't know if I can keep cheating. The problem is that if I have an animation play, then in the sequence tab have it do a "Play Next" for another animation, sometimes it just won't start the next animation. In the past, it seemed like the problem was the blend-in duration. If I had it set to 0.00, it just would inconsistently kick the next animation off. This was especially prevalent if I had two Atoms (with identically-named animations) trying to run at the same time. My workaround in the past was to just add a very short blend-in duration (like 0.001 or 0.10 seconds.) between each animation, and sync the first frame of the next animation to the animation before it. If you look at all of my scenes, I've ended up doing this.

Now that I'm using your newest (soon to be free!) release of Timeline, and I'm using the "apply pose on transition" feature, I no longer have this option since the blend-in duration is locked to 0.00.

Do you have any advice on this? Is this a long-standing bug that I just ignored, or am I doing something way wrong here? I can provide video of the scene I am working on to show you the problem, if you need it.

And for what it's worth, it seems like each time it fails to continue, the logs show this "non-looping complete" message (56.609 in the log below.) In this particular log, it seems like only one of the atoms is getting scheduled to run the next animation (Pose2 to Pose3.)

I thought maybe it was because the next animation was not getting scheduled (you can see at the last 54.932 the transition scheduled from Pose2 to Pose3 does not get applied to both atoms.) But then I ran it again and saw this:

Again, this failed to play the next animation (this time Pose1) but it did schedule Pose1 for both atoms (last 76.945 entries.)

I have tried this both with and without the "master" option and the results seem to be the same, just minus the "SendMasterClipState" info.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Acid Bubbles updated Timeline with a new update entry:

Timeline v5.0.0

This version improves mocap capabilities, it also contains a lot of user interface improvements and a few major features like transition fade, built-in pose support and much more. The release notes are quite long, here's a quick overview of the main ones:

• Zoom animations
• Collapsible dope sheet groups
• Leap Motion fingers recording
• High resolution mocap recording
• Reposition animations
• Per-animation poses
• Fade transitions
• Split, merge...

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[vamurai]

I mean... that reply obviously wasn't for me, but I went ahead and updated to the latest version anyway! I popped the scene open, having made no changes to it since yesterday, and applied the newer version of Timeline to both Atoms. I ran it a few times (it's only currently about 40 seconds long, with about six consecutive animations) and each time it went perfectly.

I'll keep developing the scene this weekend/upcoming week and let you know if I continue to see the issue. For now, I am cautiously optimistic!

 

[8Ball]

Hi, I am using the Record-Screen - working so far.

How can I append/insert a recording to a animation?

If I record Anim 1 for 10 seconds - hand movement - and rercord again, the keyframes are overwritten starting second 0, but I want to continue recording at second 10.

Sorry for the question, I searched this thread for "append" and looked in the online help but did not find an answer.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@vamurai I was out of time yesterday, but I came right now to ask if maybe the new version fixed it... I was very glad to see that it did! Another scene also had issues with the latest beta, so I suspected the issue was similar https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/meet-the-mitchells.11946/#post-31703

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@8Ball yeah I tried to add this at the last minute but it wasn't as simple as I hoped. What I suggest you do is record in a separate animation, then either merge the animations (https://github.com/acidbubbles/vam-timeline/wiki/Add-animations-screen#merge-with-next-animation) or copy/paste the part you want inside the other animation (https://github.com/acidbubbles/vam-timeline/wiki/Bulk-screen#delete-cut-copy-and-paste-frames)

While this is a workaround, it also makes it easier to pick exactly the right part, and potentially tweak it before merging.

 

[Lamp]

Small bug report, have not tried to recreate :
Anim name 20 shows as Anim name 110
EG - the animation value after "Anim 19" = "Anim 110"
It continues from here on to 111, 112, etc

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@Lamp good catch!! I'll include this in the next build

 

[vamurai]

@vamurai I was out of time yesterday, but I came right now to ask if maybe the new version fixed it... I was very glad to see that it did! Another scene also had issues with the latest beta, so I suspected the issue was similar https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/meet-the-mitchells.11946/#post-31703

Did a little more development today, and I was able to add two more animations and they worked great. I think we're good! Thanks again for all you do!

 

[vamurai]

Question about "Time Mode." The relevant bit of documentation states:

Whether to play in real time (clock time) or in game (unity) time. The latter will slow down when the CPU cannot keep up with the physics, so animations can play in slow motion. Clock time is better if you need to sync up with music for example, however game time will allow non-Timeline timings such as Animation Pattern to stay in sync, and will also avoid potential physics anomalies. When the CPU is fast enough for the VaM settings, both should play approximately at the same speed

This is a great description for what the different time modes are attempting to accomplish. What I'm wondering is what practical impact this has on the actual frames being displayed while the animations run. In my recent work, I am noticing moments where certain keyframes (particularly triggers) are not always being played. I'm wondering if maybe using one time mode over another is useful here?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@vamurai wow, people read the documentation! The only practical impact it will have is what time delta will be applied between each Unity (fixed) update. In the case of triggers, they are evaluated every update cycle, so technically it _could_ have an impact, but you'd have to have a REALLY low framerate and REALLY close trigger keyframes. For example, if you have a keyframe at A = 1.000, B = 1.001 and C = 1.002, the trigger B will only evaluated if the clip time lands between 1.001 and 1.002 - epsilon. That's a thousandth of a second, so in such a case, by moving "faster" you'd increase the chances of skipping a trigger. But for reasonable timings, such as triggers of a length of 1/10th of a second, you'd have to get less than 10fps to skip a trigger.

I'd say as a general rule, unity time is fine for most cases, and clock time is good if you need to sync with music. Eventually I'll also have "audio time" which will sync up with an audio clip, but that's for another day

 

[vamurai]

Thank you, this is a great explanation. I will start looking at what the triggers are doing and see if I can spot problems there, rather than assuming the triggers are fully being missed!

 

[Acid Bubbles]

I will also add logging when _calling_ triggers, this would be a fairly simple add. I didn't plan a release right now but it could be useful in the future.

 

[vamurai]

I will also add logging when _calling_ triggers, this would be a fairly simple add. I didn't plan a release right now but it could be useful in the future.

No rush! I'm trying some new stuff in this scene. There are some very tight tolerances for triggers and other animations, plus I'm making use of the pose loading on animation transition, mixed with doing it the old way. It's... Kind of intense. I am not at all shocked if I'm doing things the wrong way, and I'm not at all convinced that when something gets weird that it's Timeline's fault. That's why I was asking for clarity around how your plugin does what it does. I'm not one to blame the tool when I'm the one swinging it wrong.

Also: Yes, some of us DO read the documentation, haha!

 

[Acid Bubbles]

So @vamurai I checked and logging outbound trigger events would not be as simple as I thought. Well, the simple version would be useful because you wouldn't know which trigger from which animation, and knowing which would have a small performance penalty. So I'd suggest you try with a test event, like making a cube color red, so you can visually see if your trigger is called or not.

 

[vamurai]

Yeah, no worries! Like I said, it's more likely I am doing something dumb than anything else. I don't know why every scene I make has to be harder and more complex than the one before it! I'll probably end up making some simple scenes like I did last time as a distraction from my big project. Nothing wrong with that!