Pausing Animation - Why So Difficult?

[lee_j_keith]

Hi,

I have a dummy object that is wired to other objects in the scene. I've animated the dummy object's rotation. All good. However I need to be able to turn off the animation so that I can animate other objects in the scene and render them out using a different camera. I tried using animation layers, but as soon as you add another layer, the wired objects no longer rotate. Any suggestions?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

The only way so far i have found, is to use the Motion Mixer:

1. Save your (dummy) animation as a .xaf file.
2. Open MotionEditor and add the dummy as Max-Object 
3. Right-Click the track with the Dummy object-->New Clips-->From files and load your dummy animation.

That`s it. You can now use the icon in front of the track to mute the dummy animation(and also the wired object)

Of course this also has the benefit, that you can load various different animations for the dummy and probably other objects and mix,retime,blend or reverse their animations.

Hope that helps. Also you should file an idea for this in the Ideas section.

[lee_j_keith]

Thank you for the suggestion. It mostly works for me accept for one problem. The rotation animation on the dummy object is only 7 frames, and it's keys are set to relative repeat on the out-of-range parameter curve types. So when I load in the animation, it only loads 7 frames. If I load in the animation using the Animation -> Load Animation command, it works as expected. Motion Mixer though doesn't understand the out-of-range keys I guess. I guess if I can't figure this part out, I can convert the out-of-range keys to actual keys.

[Anonymous]

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@lee_j_keith wrote:

Thank you for the suggestion. It mostly works for me accept for one problem. The rotation animation on the dummy object is only 7 frames, and it's keys are set to relative repeat on the out-of-range parameter curve types. So when I load in the animation, it only loads 7 frames. If I load in the animation using the Animation -> Load Animation command, it works as expected. Motion Mixer though doesn't understand the out-of-range keys I guess. I guess if I can't figure this part out, I can convert the out-of-range keys to actual keys.

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No need for this:

Right-click the clip in the Motion Mixer->Tile Range. This fills the active time range with the motion clips.

Quote from the docs:

Tile Range

Tiles the selected clip along the range of the active time segment. The number of duplicated clips depends upon the clip's length and the number of frames in the active time segment. For example, if a clip is 100 frames long and the number of frames in the active time segment is 500, then the clip will tile five times.

[lee_j_keith]

That tool is pretty neat, but in this case the relative repeat option is needed. The dummy rotates 360 degrees in 7 frames, but because of how it is wired to drive other objects, which rotate at 32 times slower, it must be accumulative else the driven object jump back to there starting point. I'll just convert the relative repeat keys to actual keys and load those into motion mixer. The mute option is a great find, thanks!