Graphics

How do you put stop points on animations, as in bullet points reading on?

In the scene director, where your animation controllers are, there are multiple timelines. right click inside the timeline and you will see that you can insert other animation controllers and you can insert events. right click and examine an event and you will see that you can set pauses, "jump to" frames, loop points, and other neat tricks inside that event.

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Thanks again! I got thrown into a live show in days with "self training"! :)

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I figured out how to add the event/pause, but cannot get it to play out that way. Is there any documentation available on how to use events?

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Okay, the thing that gets most people is what happens after the pause. The culprit is the jump to frame field is probably set to zero, that way you basically go back to the beginning of the animation. When you insert a pause, say at frame 30, then set your jump to field to 30. That way when you continue the animation, it starts at 30.

Say you have a video clip in the scene director that has an animation on, then a loop that starts at 10.* You could set an event at the end of the clip and the jump to field will be 10 and it will loop indefinitely. But what happens if you have some other animations occuring during the loop? Simple, just drag a second instance of the clip into the timeline and have the event jump to the first frame of the start of the loop in the second instance and an event that loops back to the 10th frame of the second instance of the clip.

* Okay, this got a bit complex as it starts to involve materials. You can directly drag video clip materials into the timeline of the scene director, but you must make sure that in the video clip material, autoplay is unchecked. This is handy for frame accurate effects in the timeline like object animations and such.

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So once you set the pauses, can you manually trigger them from the sequence mode or do they automatically trigger from the frame number you set?

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yes, once you get them in the sequencer you can trigger a continue, it will say "paused" when it reaches the pause point.

The scroller's position is set in the event. So when you set a pause and leave the "jump to frame" field at zero, you are telling the scroller to pause and then go to frame zero when the operator continues.

The event is quite powerful, allowing the scene director to even take the graphic it's attached to offline.

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I actually would not set the event to jump to a certain frame, but rather check the Relative option in the Actions-section in the Scene Directory Event Properties, and leave the Jump To Frame at 0.

This way you would still jump to the current frame when resuming the pause, but, in the event you have to retime your animations, you wouldn't have to change your event but just drag it along the timeline.

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Thank you. I still can't seem to figure out how to trigger past the pause. The animation just stops there when played out.

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Are you creating your animation in the system using the "Continuous Animation" feature or are you playing back a clip?

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I am just trying to create text animation with bullet points I can trigger manually during a show.

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okay.

Well you would need to animate (Key Frame on the Animation Controller) each Text Object. So for each bullet point you need a separate Text Object. Then you Key Frame them in the order you want. Follow the insertion of the Event as described above.

The other option is to make an animation controller for each item and that what you can move the animation controllers around on the Scene director to adjust timings. Again you would place the Pause Events on the Scene Director to tell it when to wait for a user input to continue.

Les

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I did the keyframe animation on each bullet or text item with a separate animation controller, but when I put an event (pause) in front of the first bullet, it just stopped there. Is it a spacebar continue in the Sequencer or how to do you tell it to advance to each bullet?

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When in the sequencer you will see that it will go from Online to Pause. At this point make sure your focus bar is on that item (it should be) and then press the number pad Enter Key. It will then advance to your next pause state.

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Currently, if you use one of the latest sw versions, you don't need to bother about the focus. If a take item has pauses inside it will stay focused until the last pause is triggered. Forget about "Enter" button, just press "+" on your numeric pad.

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