Animation - Key Frame Content - I Want To Know

Lord_Ashes

Is there an easy way to determine what parameters are actually saved in each key frame of a sequence?

I just recently built a nice drumming sequence. The figure sits cross-legged and moves arms and hands in a drumming like motion. Even added head nods. Once I added my drum and drum sticks to the scene I had a nice short sequence that I could loop to animate any repeated drum beating.

I saved the sequence as an aniMate block so that I could use it later with a real figure as opposed to the generic Genesis figure.

However, when I added the sequence to a new figure, key parameters seem to be missing from the sequence. The arm and hand movement seemed to have been recorded but the initial character pose, for the most part, was not. I think only one "bone" from the initial position pose was set (i.e. the upper right leg was set but all other parts of the legs were not set).

I am guessing that when I was setting the initial position, I must have accidentally deselected the first key frame and thus a lot of the parameters were set on the figure but not as part of the sequence. Thus when the sequence re-loaded it use current (zeroed) values for these parameters and that is why I got the odd results.

So the question becomes, is there a quick way to check which parameters are set at each key frame? As far as I can tell only the values that are changed on a key frame are saved as part of the key frame. This makes sense because if you have say 3 key frames and you set parameter 1 on key frames 1 and 3 only then you do not want to "record" the property's value at key frame 2 because at that point it is just being extrapolated. But if I go to such a key frame, how can I tell if a particular property is being set by that frame or not?

As I mentioned in other posts, the program Anim8or solves this issue by having a nice object/bone-property vs time chart where objects and their bone properties are listed down the page and the timeline is shown across the page. Each cell that is a key frame for a particular bone property is shown with a different color and can be clicked on to view the actual property value. This allows the user to easily find an object, cross reference it it a desired time on the timeline and see which properties where changes on that frame.

This would be a really big help in Daz.