Four Basic Timeline Animation Tool Improvements

dan2050

These are fairly primitive updates that should not be too difficult to implement.

Add or remove frames at a point in the timeline.

This is a real must. By adding frames between keyframes you slow the movements down, by removing frames you speed them up. If you remove a frame with a key frame attached then it just gets deleted. All these should have an undo function. An advanced version would be to do this for the timeline of a specific object, but this would require better clarity on sperate object timeline editing.

Record texture changes as part of the animation.

Say you want a TV set running in the background. A way to animate that is to run images as texture across the screen surface. Its also a good way to add interactive smudges to a character or to have make up being applied in scene.

Save the model at a given frame without any timeline information.

This allows a moment in a scene to be saved off to a different model. That can be used as the start of a whole new scene seperate to the first. Particularly useful if you want to add or remove complex objects to or from the secen. For example a character leaves the room. Save the scene moment. Open the saved scene and delete the character that left from the model. Reduces total model complexity and allows fine grained focus moments.

Designated Render Camera that is changeable at key frames.

Allow camera movements and switching during the render process.

Squishy

I don't have super super strong opinions about 3 and 4 but retiming animation and being able to animate materials would be a huge step forward. A modern animation retargeter would also be very welcome, it's shocking there is no DAZ internal retargeting tool.

dan2050

Keyframe Past Effect I've been doing some more animating and have found some really big key frame things. Firstly is good to see you can keyframe a node heirarchy from a designated node. However I would also like to be able to designated how many frames in the past a given key can impact. I keep accidentally adjusting a node at a point of time only to find out it screws up all my settings many seconds in the past to the last frame for the item. It would be good at a frame to indicate how far back in time its influence should begin (blocked by a previous key of course). The system then creates a key at the past moment that is a copy of the most recent key in the past.

dan2050

Anoying UI FixThe fields at bottom left about frames, Total, Range, Current, FPS, all update as each keystroke goes in. That is horrible. Say I want to change 200 to 190. I select the field and type '1' on the way to '190'. The whole system throws away all the frames except frame 1. Every data entry system in the universe allows you to type and hit enter before reacting. This is really annoying that the system doesn't do that.