Is it possible to "mute" keys? (animating in the middle of an ocean of keys)

[exsulator]

What I mean by "mute" is that I'd like to effectively delete the keys for the area I'm animating currently, but still keep them saved where they are so that they move stuff only when the timeslider gets there. In other words: the benefit of animating when there's no future keys in the way.

The use case is to animate in the middle of existing keys: It's very annoying that the keys to the right keeps pulling the character away from the previous pose (gif). You don't have this problem when there's no keys to the right.

But the most obvious solutions are very unsatisfying :

• Why not worked in stepped? Because while scrubbing the timeslider I need to see the animation move.
• Why not delete the keys to the right? Because there's maybe thousands of keys and in a complicated scene something might break if you delete and reimport the keys.
• Why not copy the previous key and work on that as a base? Because I'll get keys on controllers that doesn't need keys, and in my current workflow I don't add keys to everything for each tiny change

If there's a way to "mute" the next keys, or something that allows me to effectively work before them without them pulling on the animation, but the next keys still moves stuff once the timeslider gets to them?

I'd be glad to hear any suggestion!

PS: I'd like to not export the animation and reimport it, as that can cause issues in the scene.

[stephenkmann]

time slide with the Middle mouse button

[exsulator]

Ty for the suggestion, but that simply gives me a copy of the previous key and it doesn't really solve the workflow issue.

Consider that you middle mouse drag previous key and hit S.

Now you've keyed the entire control set, and you're forced to use the "key all controls" workflow.

Imagine that you want to do the following: controller A should tween from frame 1 to frame 100 uninterrupted..

Then controller B should have keys on frame 1, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100.

The rest of the alphabet similarly needs keys in different places with varying frequency.

If you use the workflow of "key all controls every time" the timeslider is full of "useless" keys. Once you reach frame 100, you find that controller A now have 8 keys from frame 10-90 with the wrong values. You must correct 8 keys.

Consider a large control set with this method. You will have to go back and fix hundreds of "useless" keys.

You don't have to do this at all... if there's no keys in the future that pulls on your current keys.

Sry it's a long rant but... I really wish there was a solution to this problem... thus far, I delete all future keys, animate, then reimport the delted keys to get the desired effect of having no "future pull"