Plugins Timeline

[Tankshell]

@Acid Bubbles Hi. I’ve just started delving into Timeline and so far it all looks very comprehensive. Amazing job.

I have a beginner question (I guess this probably gets asked a lot), I did do some searching about and have talked with some other Hub members but I’m still not sure, basically:

After importing a Timeline animation onto a female atom in a scene, how can I offset the female atom “as a whole” within the scene, so that the animation still plays as normal?

Basically, I want to import a pre made Timeline animation (or multiple different animations) of some idles (sitting on a chair/end of bed) and align the female atom with that animation to the pre existing furniture in my scene.

I can also foresee moving furniture about inside my scene and therefore would also need the ability to move the female atoms (with the corresponding animations) to match, quite frequently whilst I set things up etc.

I imagine there is a workflow for this but currently I do not know Timeline (or VaM) that well so looking for some guidance.

Many thanks for any tips you can give me.

EDIT - through trial and error, I think the "Overwrite Pose" button is possibly what I am looking for. It seems to do what I want, even if the terminology used here doesn't mean a lot to me in terms of what I am trying to achieve.

A label like like "Save Atom Position" might make it more obvious to total beginners like me

 

[Clocksmith]

Just verifying the new features: will the new global triggers for On Play make it to where I can, for example, RegisterAction in my own plugin's C# code for when a new animation starts playing in Timeline?

I have a plugin I'm developing that does some semi-complicated audio patterns depending on the animation. So far, I have had to painstakingly try to calibrate and calculate the duration of each animation and change those durations in code when I change the animation duration in Timeline. It would be far easier if my plugin could attach to a trigger like this and receive new play events to know which animation is currently playing.

I'm open to better suggestions too if I'm missing one. And code examples if you or anyone like @cheesywheesy has them.

 

[pinosante]

@Acid Bubbles Hi. I’ve just started delving into Timeline and so far it all looks very comprehensive. Amazing job.

I have a beginner question (I guess this probably gets asked a lot), I did do some searching about and have talked with some other Hub members but I’m still not sure, basically:

After importing a Timeline animation onto a female atom in a scene, how can I offset the female atom “as a whole” within the scene, so that the animation still plays as normal?

Basically, I want to import a pre made Timeline animation (or multiple different animations) of some idles (sitting on a chair/end of bed) and align the female atom with that animation to the pre existing furniture in my scene.

I can also foresee moving furniture about inside my scene and therefore would also need the ability to move the female atoms (with the corresponding animations) to match, quite frequently whilst I set things up etc.

I imagine there is a workflow for this but currently I do not know Timeline (or VaM) that well so looking for some guidance.

Many thanks for any tips you can give me.

EDIT - through trial and error, I think the "Overwrite Pose" button is possibly what I am looking for. It seems to do what I want, even if the terminology used here doesn't mean a lot to me in terms of what I am trying to achieve.

A label like like "Save Atom Position" might make it more obvious to total beginners like me

Your solution works, but it "hard switches" to a new pose (so it does not only save the position you want, but also the pose). So if your animation has some transition, this will basically pick up the character and immediatly switch it into the pose at the position you saved it at. This might work for your use case, but can make things miserable if you want continuous animations with transitions. (Because it will not only move your character to the position you saved it at, but also into the pose it was saved in).

Another solution is to add the "control" variable to the timeline. So next to head, hips, whatever, you can also add "control". This gives you control over the position of the character. I think this is what you want.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@falbst I'd really like to understand the broken keyframe issue you have shown but I don't understand the steps, nor the result. https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/timeline.94/post-122622

Can you help me and:

1. Either record or lead me step by step on what you do? "Recording with Embody" should create tons of keyframes and in the screenshot there's only one, and "multiple curve types" is also unclear what it means in practice.
2. Send a "broken" scene with exactly which keyframe is broken? That might be enough for me to figure it out.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@bill_prime I was looking at https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/timeline.94/post-95602 (I know, I know...) but I cannot reproduce it. If you have a way to help me reproduce, it would be appreciated!

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Acid Bubbles updated Timeline with a new update entry:

Timeline v6.3.1

- Fix compression so it doesn't trip up text editors (NOTE: Animations saved with 283 cannot be opened in earlier versions!)
- Fix issue that targets the main gender of a morph when the added morph was actually for the other gender
- When using Split Position and Rotation, split for all animations of the layer
- Real time now supports time scale
- Fix copy paste controls on an animation that doesn't contain them

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[Torath]

Hey all.

I was reluctant to make an account here and I have looked for an answer to my question for days now... so here I am.

My question is:
Is it possible to run two separate animations independent from each other using only one copy of the plugin or do I have to use two like I have been?

For example running a interactive scene where some atoms are running in a loop and then other animations can be activated along side it, proving they don't interfere with the main ones of course.

I did see the wiki regarding anims, layers and segments but I found it a little vague and left me with more questions.

 

[urukyay]

Hi, I have a small suggestion :
When a target is the control of some atom, instead of using 'control' as the track name in the timeline view, use the atom's name instead. When 'control' targets are grouped together in a custom group, they all show as just 'control' currently, and you're not able to tell which is which.

 

[SleepyV]

Is this a bug? I had an instances where selected targets stopped showing up on the scubber line on the left. The targets could be selected but the graph was empty. they just vanished when I was changing the selected atom.
When I restarted VAM everything was set to default as if I didn't do anything and all the work was gone..

 

[DasIstBooschitt]

Would love to see a future feature/function to easily delete an animation and all of its associated layers. It's currently a real pain to delete an animation with multiple layers... Unless I'm missing something?

 

[falbst]

@falbst I'd really like to understand the broken keyframe issue you have shown but I don't understand the steps, nor the result. https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/timeline.94/post-122622

Can you help me and:

1. Either record or lead me step by step on what you do? "Recording with Embody" should create tons of keyframes and in the screenshot there's only one, and "multiple curve types" is also unclear what it means in practice.
2. Send a "broken" scene with exactly which keyframe is broken? That might be enough for me to figure it out.

@Acid Bubbles, Gidday, thanks for your response. i will try and get out a scene to you for testing but I have found a workaround and instead of using the flat curve for animation when using embody I use the Flat->linear curve and it works perfectly.

btw, Awesome update thank you.


Also, would it be possible to save float params?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@falbst what do you mean by, save float params? Float param animations should be save like everything else?

 

[falbst]

@falbst what do you mean by, save float params? Float param animations should be save like everything else?

oh sorry, I should have made it clearer, what i meant was to save the Float param (export) and import them to another brand new scene.

 

[jaro]

This plugin should be a standard in VAM. Thank you very, very much!!
I've found 4 problems - 1-3 are easy to reproduce, 4 not.
1) Loading file-presets (e. g. poses, clothings ... you name it) with a trigger via "Load Preset with Path" does not work. You can choose a file-preset but don't click okay to go back to the trigger list or test it. Workaround is "Load preset with name".
2) The VAMTimeline.ControllerPlugin is great. Combined with your keybindings plugin you are getting errors if you change between atoms: If you delete, copy or cut a key in timeline it will try to do this for the formerly chosen atom. This can give the error "nothing to delete/copy/cut" or delete/copy/cut something in the timeline of the other atom.
3) Using targets --> Presets --> "Add Fingers" and removing the fingers leads to a situation, where poses with fingers do not work anymore. It seems as if removing a target does not remove this target completely.
4) Parenting often leads to errors in timeline but is not easy to reproduce. E. G.: I parent the LeftHandController from atom 1 to the Head of atom 2. It is irrelevant if hand and head are targets in the timelines or not. I save the pose (inclusive bones, morphs, root and apply on transition). If I switch to another animation and come back the hand is often... somewhere. It will be somewhere every time I come back - even if I reposition the hand and/or update the pose. My workaround is a physics link, but this does not look so good.

Two wishes for the future:
1) ControllerPlugin allows the creation of new animations for all atoms with the timeline-plugin.
2) ControllerPlugin allows editing of all animations from atoms with the timeline-plugin.

 

[mikael]

Would there be the possibility to add an "undo" function - even if it's just for keyframes and some basic functions within the UI? Many times I've accidentally deleted the keyframes and haven't saved :-(

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@jaro Thanks! And yeah there are a couple of rough edges, like 1 and 2.... for 3, you also need to change back the fingers settings in the "Hands" tab on the Person atom. And for 4, avoid parenting. There's an option in Timeline (expand the controller on the right) to enable Timeline-controlled parenting which avoids a lot of issues with native parenting. Try it!

@mikael I knooow I tried implementing it at least 3 times but it's not obvious at this point in the architecture of Timeline (it wasn't intially designed to be so complex).

 

[ispinox]

Would it be possible to:
On a person atom when clicking ''apply pose on transition'' > ''blend-in duration'' automatically goes to ''0'' as it should be.
Now when there is a camera (empty or window-camera) you want to have it in sync with the person atoms
but you can't ''apply pose on transition'' and have to adjust blend-in time manually. It gets annoying when you forget it until you figure out whats wrong.

Just a small QOL feature if possible

 

[TBD]

Splitting animations at scrubber position doesn't seem to maintain trigger tracks correctly. The left part is usually fine but the newly created animation does not contain all triggers and/or not at the correct timestamps. It's not new to this version, though.

 

[Pao44445]

Hi, I am new to the game, is there a guide or example how to create sex animation? I came from TK17 and thought this one would be a cakewalk

 

[bill_prime]

@Acid Bubbles
Hi Acid, can you explain how to setup the prevent Exit animation selection in group feature?
I see the checkbox when sequencing to a group, but how do you set an animation within the group as an "Exit Animation"?

 

[Acid Bubbles]

@ispinox I thought I was already doing that! Added to the list.

@8n2ybclyk982 Yeah I already had this on my list. Thanks!

@Pao44445 I'd love to tell you that it's simple, but VaM is already hard, and while Timeline is pretty simple for an animation software, making animations is also not easy! But it's extremely rewarding though so I hope you figure it out! I made videos on the Timeline wiki, and other people also made tutorials in the Guide section of Hub. Good luck!

@bill_prime if I remember right, when you enter a group like dancing/*, you might have dancing/1 to dancing/9 and dancing/exit for example. You can mark dancing/exit as prevent exit animation and that will avoid entering dancing/* directly in the exit animation, ensuring at least one loop.

 

[SelakAR]

Segments are broken.
Sorry I cannot use Github so I'm uploading here. It's a scene example with no dependencies that demonstrates that "Next Animation" and "Previous Animation", launched with triggers (like a button), don't work after you change a segment.
Moreover, the action "Segment" (internally a StringChooserParam) has no effect either.
I hope this can be fixed soon; I have a complex scene that I cannot release because of this.

 

[PhantasyStarfan]

Is this relegated to morphs or does it also work on poses whereby you can change character expressions?

 

[VAMSOY]

For me, this is THE greatest plugin of all time. So huge thanks to Acid Bubbles.

I have a suggestion (or question) on functionality. Let's say I have 10 different animation Segments in one scene. I usually add 10 UI buttons to the scene (with triggers to play those animations). Now, there are often times I only want a certain atom (ex.light) to be on during 1 specific segment and off during all others. Currently, I have to add a trigger to each of the 10 segments to control the status of the light. For each additional atom, i have to do the same process 10 times again. I am wondering if it's possible to bulid in some sort of conditional trigger. For example. ONLY IF segment XX is playing, THEN turn on Light No. X. Otherwise keep Light No. X off. This could reduce the workload by quite a lot in some situations.

Any thoughts on this are welcomed!! Thanks!

 

[TRSD]

Hello,
I thought I understood what weight did, but suddenly I don't.
I have a breathing animation I wanted to scale the depth of with weight. I thought weight would divide the values of each key. But what actually happens is it depends on when during the animation you change the weight:

(the slider changes weight for the specific animation from 0.030 to 1.000)
So if I turn the weight way down while the jaw is at ~60, it stays around 60.
If I turn it down when it's at 20, it stays around 20.

I just need to know if this is me misunderstanding the purpose of weight, or if it's a bug.