Timeline
Timeline is used to control the animation and to edit time dependent parameters.
Header
The header contains various menus and controls.
Timeline
Set working area range (in point or out point) to current frame.
Zoom Plus or Zoom Minus widen or shorten the width of working area.
Channel
Enable/disable extrapolation of selected parameter.
If extrapolation is enabled, "E" mark is shown on the parameter.
Key
Menu for copy & paste, and delete of selected key(s).
*Note 1* The time line must have at least one key. You can not delete the last key from the timeline.
*Note 2* If there is no selected key in timeline, delete event is processed in more globaly and deletion of selected object would be triggered.
Zoom
With "+" and "-" Butttons on the right side of the header, you can change the font size of the timeline panel.
Main panel
Sliders
Working Area
There are two lines with sliders at the top of timeline.
Blue slider controls current time index.
Green paired slider controls viewing/working area.
White regin between green sliders represents working area.
Upper and narrower paired green slider controls viewing range. You can zoom in/out or offset the timeline by dragging sliders.
Lower paired green slider controls working area, which define the start/end frame of the animation/playback range.
Unit of time
The two numbers in the text box is current index and subindex.
Subindex is used for interpolate between sequential snapshot data.
For example, when sequential data%03d.dat is shown and interval is set to 10, evenly interpolated data between data002.dat and data003.dat is shown at time with index 2 and subindex 5.
You can change type of tics by clicking selector icon.
| Sequence Index | tics are base on index.
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| Normalized Time | Normalized time changes between 0 to 1 through entire scene.
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| Scene Frame | Scene frame including subindex. For example, scene with index length 100 with interval 2 has 200 frames.
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Kilroy (Shy), Stopwatch, and Cursor icons
Kilroy icon controls show/hide state of items. When enabled grobally, items with shy mode is hidden from timeline.
Use to simplify timeline with too much parameters.
Stopwatch icon controls show/hide state of item. When enabled, only parameters that depends on time would be shown and constant parameters would be hidden.
Cursor icon controls show/hide state of item. When enabled, only selected items would be shown.
Item selection and Popup Menu
You can select objects in several ways. In timeline panel, you can select objects by clicking left mouse button on its name.
Orange background color represents "active" state and blue text color represents "selected" state.
When you click with another object with ctrl-LMB (additional selection), new object becomes active and old active object remains as selected.
Clicking small triangl attached to each object, you can open/close the parameteres that the object has.
By clicking the name of parameter, you can select that parameter. When a parameter is selected, the graph displayed on graph editer would be replaced to that one.
By clicking right mouse button on active object, you can rename/delete the object with popup menu.
Parameters
Each objecs has several parameters that can changed with time, that would be shown on the timeline panel.
If stopwatch icons enabled, the parameter becomes time-dependent.
When time-dependent parameters are changed, key frames are inserted to the timeline at the current index, and parameters are interpolated between key frames.
If parameter is not time-dependent and new parameter is set, it simply overridden independently with time.
Some parameter of object (such as position) can be inputed in 3D View panel or controled by mouse handling.
Also, you can input them directly from timeline panel by clicking number.
Linking
Link / Unlink icons controls whether components of parameter are simultaneously controled. If linked, when new keyframe is inserted to X component, key frames would be automatically inserted to Y and Z components.
Expression
If enabled, parameters are evaluated via Lua expression. Expression can be edited by clicking the next button (hidden when disabled).
When edit button is clicked, Active text in Text Editor panel would be changed to the expression.
Checkbox / Move between keyframe
Checkbox at each parameter is linked to keyframes. When keyframe exist at current time, checkbox would be checked.
You can insert/delete by clicking checkbox.
The triangle buttons beside checkbox moves time to next/previous keyframe.
Interplation
Time dependent parameters are interpolated bewteen keyframes.
See the section "Interpolation" for details of interpolation.
Controls
The buttons at bottom area controls current time and play/stop of animation.
Toggle repeat mode.
Move to first frame, play back, step backward, step forward, play forward, move to last frame.
Default type of key frame
You can set default interpolation type for new key. If default is set to Auto, the type of new key frame would be the same to that of neibour key frame.
Stepping
Subindex leaps by this stepping value in animation.
Interval
How much subindices are inserted between time index. This value is also the maximum value of subindex.
Way for interpolation
A way for interplation. When data is selected, output image is generated from a interpolated data set. On the other hand, when image is selected, an interpolated image is generated from two images generated by individual frame data.
In general, former method is smoother, However, later method can be useful when data changes rapidly on colorcurve.
Considering a case when a green - yellow - red colorcurve is used and all data element is green or red. However, if these data are simply interpolated, some data element may have middle value and artificial yellow region may appear.
This problem can be serious one for fast-flowing and fast changing volume data (e.g. shockwave) with low time resolution, because interpolation is done on the meshed space, not fluid segment itself.
Interpolation between images can prevent such artificial color appearance.
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