How do you truly get rid of the timeline?
Hexdrake21
Posts: 109
How do you truly get rid of the timeline?
Hi, I was wondering how to completely start over with a character and all their items. Posing is not neccessary. I tried saving as a scene subset, dropping the timeline down to 1 frame, creating a new scene, and loading the subset. It still has a 22k file size. In comparison, a similar character is only 4k, and she is less complex. The file size is also the same as when I had a normal timeline, so I know it is still saving a timeline. I want to get the file size back down to around 4k to improve loading times and space requirements -- just save the character and her items, etc. Anyone had an issue with this? I made several adjustements to my character while working in a timeline, so I'd prefer not to go back to my old character and redo everything I had not loaded/morphed past that point. Thanks to everyone in advance for their insight ;-) !
See attached for example of two characters. The yellow one (Sunrise) has a file size of 22k, while the black one (Coldshadow) is 4k.
Hexdrake
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Comments
While Daz's animation capabilities are very janky and in need of a total overhaul (here's hoping for DS5), you can try right-clicking on the timeline and selecting "Refresh", which will make hidden keyframes appear. I think you also have to unlock all of the properties, because locked properties disappear from the timeline.
Edit>Figure>Clear Animation>Clear figure should remove all keys
I have removed the keys, set the timeline to 1 frame, and cleared the animation as Richard suggested. I have selected the figure and all children, and still the file is stuck on 22k. Just for fun, I deleted the hair and saved -- that dropped it to 19k. Any other suggestions?
I have been trying to clear the timeline up to the last frame (30 of 30) but am having trouble doing so. I've tried moving the scrub pointer (Current) to frame 30 and then setting the Range to 30 of 30 and the Total to 1 but I am still left with Frame 0 not Frame 30. This is important to me because I want to add a new animation to the previous one by starting the new animation on the final frame of the previous. I want to have alternatives for the continuation it is not just a matter of adding more frames to the original 30.
So far, the only way I have been able to do it is by copying the keyframes at frame 30 and pasting them at frame 0 and then reducing the timeline to that single frame (0).
2020 was part of a timeline lots of people would like to delete.
Another question I have is this: how to clear "keyframes" that don't show in the timeline? Often there is movement without it being marked by a little keyframe triangle.
If you're saving the figure with clothing, it could be the textures blowing up the file size and not the timeline.
If you have the correct node selectedand if the filtering shows the keyed property's type there must be keys, though of course there is movement between keys (especially using the default interpolation).
Perhaps it is down to interpolation but I will try to take notice next time I need to remove some positional movement. Is there a description of the (various?) interpolation methods? Maybe I need to figure those out so that I don't get unwanted movement. There are other oddities with shaping morphs and geografts which don't save with the scene but that's another story. I have reported that to support long ago but, of course, had no response.
There was a bug with saving some properties but I thought it was fixed. If you are on a slightly older DS I also think there was a bug in displaying some properties.
I'm not on a beta release, I'm on the latest General Release : 4.15.0.2
Whenever I save an animation scene I have to redo some (though not all) of the morphs. Especially morphs affecting GeoGrafts. If I need a more complete save, I follow a tip you once proposed and save the figure as a Properties Preset which does seem to hang on to most of my adjustments.
Nevertheless, this is a bit of a diversion. Returning to the main theme, I hope that DS5 will include fixes for the timeline so that we can do something which should trivial: save out a frame as a Scene (or Subset) without having to jump through multiple hoops to do so.
Thanks for the advice! I managed to get the timeline down to 0, and it doesn't seem to be the problem. At some point after I used the simulation on the timeline, my file size blew up. I'm still not sure what's causing it, some kind of corruption? It loads slowly, but considering it's x8 the size of similar files, one would think it would much longer to load. Looked through my saved scenes and apparently there are a dozen or so blown-up files. All of them used the timeline, and most of them were on the Daz beta (although I started using the timeline method more often when I installed the beta). Could it be that it's not compressing the file at some point?