Animation window ideas

[theAVator]

Just a couple suggestions for the animation window...

1: Ability to lock or unlock the animation property window (the section on the right with the time settings/pivot point/rotation)
- If you click on an animation in the timeline, it shows this section and shortens the viewable area in the timeline, which, if you're working at or near the end of the timeline can hide/cover the section you're working on.
- If you select multiple animations to move them together in the timeline, this lengthens the viewed area of the timeline. Then if you select a single one again, it changes the viewable area again, and again possibly hides the part you were working on.
-- it would be nice to be able to lock these in position, so the section on the right is always shown(blank if nothing is selected) and the timeline area doesn't keep adjusting unless you manually change it by dragging the handles on the edge.


2: Grouping animation and being able to collapse the groups to make more area available
- Right now if you have 6 animations that take place at the same time, they take up 6 lines in the timeline. This is exaggerated if you use those same actions multiple times through the duration.
-- Would be great to be able to group these together and then you would just need to duplicate or mirror the group if you wanted to. The area it highlights in the timeline would be the total duration of its subordinate animations.
-- being able to collapse these groups would be great too. Taking the example above: if you had a group of 6 animations and used them 6 times, that would take up 36 lines in the timeline. If you could collapse those, now you're down to 6 lines. Makes the programming of longer and more complex animations easier to understand.

Thanks!

[Winch Doctor]

Hi theAVator

I agree with the first bit, as I use the animation feature very often and would love this little hiccup to be worked out.

The second part, you can group your animations. If you highlight a bunch of them, you can right click and select "add to folder". It's a bit odd nomenclature-wise that it's called a folder here and a 'group' on your parts list, but it's the same thing. In my screenshot below, the group on the left titled "automatic" shows up on my timeline in gold. This gold bar can be stretched or shrunk to proportionally adjust the animations inside. It can also be mirrored, just as you requested. You can create subgroups if you drag a group title onto another group title on the left. Hope this helps!

[theAVator]

Thanks Winch Doctor!

That seems to make sense - you're right about the nomenclature, although I guess I could see it making sense now that I know about it. Since the animations are represented in the scene tree, you wouldn't want to confuse people who think 'group' might change the scene tree groupings/order... idk...?

Now to go in and actually put it to use. 

[PhilippeV8]

Alow me to add my requests for animation.  No idea if any of this has been added or fixed in v6 tho.

animation requests:
- object scale animation
- for object scale add choise of texture/label conduct
- animation window left top time box: allow for direct input of time/frame, so that the preview line jumps to that time
- on the translation input window, add "current value" (uneditable) text boxes so that when dragging the preview line, we can read the current x, y or z value ... would be helpfull.
- zoom in and out towards the preview line location rather than towards the beginning of the animation timeline !!!!!! hugely anoying when working with longer animations ...
- how about environement pin-light (sun) animation ... ?
- light emitting objects can't be faded ... making this work like having a dimmer for your light would be awesome as h*** [selfmod]