Plugins Timeline

[thx1138]

One quick note for newb like me and timeline - I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to try to 'add' a new animation on a different body part that was unrelated(running in parallel) to an earlier animation and I was trying to put it all in 1 timeline plugin instance(and the resulting confusion noticing morphs added/removed are global to all animations in the plugin instance), instead of doing what is obvious to me now of adding a second timeline plugin instance for the second body part unrelated to the first. I rewatched your video tutorials(very helpful!) and they are all focused on one plugin instance that I could tell, so wanted to post a note here for newbs or maybe something in the docs about starting a separate plugin instance as needed for different groupings of morphs.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@thx1138 you should also be able to do that with layers That also ensures there will be no conflicts between instances targeting the same morphs/controllers.

 

[thx1138]

d'oh, layers(smacks palm to forehead) - thanks for saving me from myself!

 

[thx1138]

Something I thought I could do with timeline, but don't think I can is handle person control small random rotations - so for instance doing a chest jiggle in various poses, rotating left/right about the chest axis - I can create an animation for one specific pose, but only for that pose as the position information is also recorded on the timeline and other poses with be trying to match the position and rotation of the recorded pose, not independent of their new position. I keep looking for a way to set or increment/decrement person/control numbers by trigger action, but that only seems possible by writing my own plugin script.

 

[Deleted member 1483]

Thank you for the very nice plugin.
I have a question. This plugin can bake animations for controls such as arms,
but can't　I bake facial morphs? How do that?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@UJVAM Virt-A-Mate doesn't have float params "baking", so you need some kind of plugin for playback. I had in the plans to convert those animations to animation patterns, but there's not much of a reason for it since you can usually just use Timeline (anyway it won't support the custom curve types that are required in some cases)

 

[Deleted member 1483]

@UJVAM Virt-A-Mate doesn't have float params "baking", so you need some kind of plugin for playback. I had in the plans to convert those animations to animation patterns, but there's not much of a reason for it since you can usually just use Timeline (anyway it won't support the custom curve types that are required in some cases)

@Acid Bubbles
Thank you for your answer. The facial expression animation attached on the timeline includes paid morphs, so I was wondering if I could distribute it if I could bake it.
But Baking morphs is difficult, so I will give up distribution. Thanks.

 

[VRRGCD]

BVH animation for Timeline plugin do you have an open discussion

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@UJVAM yeah even if I had morphs animation baking, you'd still need to distribute the morphs.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@VRRGCD there were a couple discussions but nothing out there. Some people will "record" the BHV in Timeline and then run simplifications and manually edit keyframes, that can be pretty time consuming but works. A "real" converter would be very nice, but there's none yet.

 

[VRRGCD]

timeline animations are in json convert bvh to json https://gyazo.com/b54317ac19a517d9932cc23edd984982
with which program did you convert the animations

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@VRRGCD I never personally usd BHV players, so I'm probably not the best person to help. The way people convert is by using Timeline's mocap record feature while BHV plays back with controllers in record mode, I don't have the details though.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Acid Bubbles updated Timeline with a new update entry:

Timeline v4.0.11

Around three months ago, WeebUVR made a comment about how Virt-A-Mate's animation patterns yielded smoother curves with fewer keyframes, and he was right. So began a quest to make Timeline superior. I've been working every day since, and I think the game has been upped.

The curve engine has been rewritten from the ground up.

Initially, Timeline was relying on Unity's animation system to work with curves, but it was pretty limited. For...

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Acid Bubbles updated Timeline with a new update entry:

Timeline v4.0.12

- Fix animations storables only showing the current layer

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[fishcakes]

Hey AB. Great work on the v4 release. Timeline was always awesome, but its getting to the point where it's utterly essential.

Everything is working nicely... mostly! Although I'm having some trouble getting the master animation feature to work. I have 2 people, both with a timeline. Both contain a single layer and animation and both use exactly the same names for both layer and anim. When setting one of them to be the master, the scrubber works well and both animations fire when the master is played. However, it doesn't look like the child anim is using the masters speed setting. If I double the masters speed, the child anim does not match it. Maybe I misunderstood, but I was under the impression your intention was to allow the master to control the speeds of other animations?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@fishcakes actually no, the master won't propagate speed to the children, but it would make sense! I'm adding this to the list, thanks

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@RizkyBizz you can use the Load Pose trigger, it will "teleport" all nodes including "off" nodes to where you need them. You can invoke that within Timeline.

 

[fishcakes]

Hey AB. Playing around some more with the 'Master' anim option. It looks like this currently isn't anim independent. i.e. If I switch it on in one anim, it turns on for all of them and vice versa. It might be that it is actually working behind the scenes, but the checkbox isn't updating. Not sure. Either way, is this expected behaviour?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@fishcakes I'm not sure I understand, can you give me a "step by step" reproduction for my poor smoking brain?

 

[fishcakes]

@fishcakes I'm not sure I understand, can you give me a "step by step" reproduction for my poor smoking brain?

No problem AB. Its not too complicated. I have timeline on a person. 2 layers, each with 1 anim. Let's call them anim1 and anim2, both with the 'master' checkbox unchecked. I go to anim1 and tick the 'master' checkbox. Then when I switch to anim2, the 'master' checkbox is also ticked even though I didn't do it manually. By the same token, if I uncheck 'master' on anim2, and then switch back to anim1, the checkbox is also unchecked. Basically, its behaving as if the 'master' setting is global, instead of per anim. Make sense?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Acid Bubbles updated Timeline with a new update entry:

Timeline v4.0.13

- Remove warning when playing a clip targeting "off" controllers
- Fix issue with play clip on master playing on other atoms with sequencing on

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[fishcakes]

Thanks for the update AB. A couple of questions if I may:-

1. Does ' Fix issue with play clip on master playing on other atoms with sequencing on' relate to the issue I posted above?
2. Regarding the new global curves. Am I understanding correctly when I say that local curves pretty much work as they did before and the new global curves are using your new bezier curve techniques? IF so, do you default to local curves so animations created with Timeline 3 will still work as expected? The global curves look much better, but I'm finding it a tad tedious having to constantly switch all new keyframes to global. Would it be possible to use global curves as the default when creating new keyframes?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@fishcakes ah yeah sorry I didn't follow up on this! Master is indeed an atom-level setting, not an animation-level setting. It drives whether sequencing affects other atoms, so it's the normal behavior.

For your curves question, the local curves use the new bezier curves engine, but like v3, they are only affected by the keyframes before and after them. Global curves balance every curves based on every other keyframes, which can give much smoother results, but potentially less predictable. After considering using global by default, I decided that it was safer to keep local by default. Note that you can use the bulk tool to change all keyframes on all targets at once, and after when you create new keyframes they will always inherit the nearest keyframe curve type, so you should only have to do this once every time you add one or multiple targets.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@mrlewie Thanks a lot! You can use the animation name prefix to do that, so if you have jump/high, jump/low and jump/mid, you can set the next animation as "jump/*" and it will randomize within that group (just prefix "group-name/" before your animation names). There's no way however to say "loop within that group for N seconds", that's something you can solve with another "master timeline" atom that only drives sequencing, but I think it's not as easy as it could. I'd have to eventually consider a separate setting for "group randomize" v.s. actual sequencing, each with their own durations. Maybe for a v5 (no plans yet)

 

[fishcakes]

@fishcakes ah yeah sorry I didn't follow up on this! Master is indeed an atom-level setting, not an animation-level setting. It drives whether sequencing affects other atoms, so it's the normal behavior.

For your curves question, the local curves use the new bezier curves engine, but like v3, they are only affected by the keyframes before and after them. Global curves balance every curves based on every other keyframes, which can give much smoother results, but potentially less predictable. After considering using global by default, I decided that it was safer to keep local by default. Note that you can use the bulk tool to change all keyframes on all targets at once, and after when you create new keyframes they will always inherit the nearest keyframe curve type, so you should only have to do this once every time you add one or multiple targets.

Riiight! I completely misunderstood. Thanks for clearing this up.