Waveform controller. How to extend animation

[markus]

Hi, I have used a waveform controller in my animation but the motion stops abruptly after 400 frames even though my timeline is 650 frames long.

How do I control the length of the waveform? I can't find it anywhere. Nothing mentioned in the docs pages. Seems like an oversight. 

https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2024/ENU/?guid=GUID-40BC5DCC-C32E-4753-8FB7-2BCC3312ACD3

I'm using 3dsmax 2023

[10DSpace]

@markus 

Did you happen to assign the waveform controller and then change the timeline to 650?  I find that when I do that I get a truncated animation also.   Try re-assigning the  controller to bezier float or whatever and then back to waveform after the timeline is the final length you want.  For me this works. 

[markus]

Yes, it seems like it stuck to being the length of the timeline at creation (and recreating it is a feasible workaround), but I was curious if there is something I'm missing here. Any way to refresh it or change the length without deleting it and creating a new controller? Seems weird if it was designed to work like this.

[10DSpace]

@markus 

I don't know for sure, but I doubt that it was intended to work like this.  Probably it was simpler to code storing the length of the timeline at the time of creation, or the programmer just didn't foresee the use case of changing the timeline length after assigning the waveform controller. 

Assuming that it is coded this way (and it seems to be), I don't see anyway to refresh the value stored originally with the new timeline length, but admittedly, I have not really played with this much, other than looking at the curve editor.  Considering the workaround take just a few seconds (right click on the assigned waveform controller and select "reset to default control" and then left click on Assign Controller again to reassign waveform), I personally would just move on to the next problem...

[markus]

You're right, in this case the workaround is pretty fast. But you can also stack more than one waveform and get pretty complex with it, and then it would be a bit of a hassle to recreate.

I also found out you can extend it by changing the controller to ignore animation length. At least sometimes it seems to refresh the stippled line (but in some cases it fails to refresh, or even save with the file).