Tips and tricks

Squash or stretch an animation

Houdini uses floating point keyframing, so there’s no need to squash or stretch or use field rendering to cheat in lengthening an animation.

Click the + icon on the playbar to open the Global Animation Parameters and turn off Integer Frame Values. Then you can enter decimal frames in the Start/End/Inc field (Output Editor > mantra parameters).

If you specify a non-integer frame increment, it will give you a stretched or squashed animation without having to adjust the channel data. For example if you enter a frame increment of 0.8, you’ll get an animation which is 20% longer.

Warning

Be careful with the name of the file for the image you're generating. The $F expression variable is always an integer, so frames with floating point frame numbers may overwrite each other. See the discussion on expressions in filenames for more details.

Tip	Set the environment variable `HOUDINI_ENABLE_FPS_SCALE` if you want your keyframes to scale as they did in Houdini 4 and prior.