Reference Global Animation Options

Frames Per Second sets the rate for animation playback when Real Time playback is enabled. You generally want to set the FPS for your animation only once, and do so before you begin animating anything at all. This is because when you change the FPS, the time of the last keyframe will not match the new animation length. If you want to modify your animation timing, you must do so explicitly.

The FPS rate for NTSC video is 30, for PAL video, it is 25, and for Film, it is 24.

Production Tip: If you made a mistake, you can use a Field cop with a Pushup / Pulldown operation to fix a sequence of rendered-out images and convert them to a different FPS after the fact.

The Start field displays the starting frame number of the animation sequence. By default, it contains a value of one. If you enter a value other than 1, an alert appears asking if you want to increase/decrease the animation length. Click on Squash/Stretch, or Truncate/Append as desired. After squashing/stretching, you may have to adjust some of the channels.

The End field displays the final frame number of the animation sequence. Entering a new value here brings up an alert asking whether you want to Squash/Stretch or Truncate/Append the data currently in the animation. Click to choose the desired function. After squashing/stretching, you may have to adjust some of the channels.

Snaps all keys to integer frame boundaries. This does the equivalent of chround -a.

If this option in turned on, you will only be able to set time frames within the start and end range. For example, if the range is 1-240 and you try to set the playbar to -43, it will fail. Turning this checkbox off allows you to set the time frame to any value.

If this option is turned on, the slider widget underneath the playbar for visually manipulating the playback range is displayed.

Overlays the current audio track on the playbar so you can see audio wave.

If this option is turned on, the playbar will show ticks representing the frame numbers.

If this option is turned on, the keyframes in current objects show up as green marks on the playbar.

Allows adjustment of the audio height, when shown on the playbar.

Houdini works with floating-point frame values ( $FF ). When enableref_win_globanimoptsd, this option confines the display of frame values to integers ( $F ). When disabled, Houdini allows you to set the current time to any value, even a fractional time that does not lie exactly on an exact frame number.

The size of a single increment in frame values. For example, entering a value of 2 here plays every second frame.

Enables realtime playback on the playbar. To control the behavior of the realtime toggle, there are two options.