Hey guys!

I often find myself wanting to step through the animation timeline with the left/right arrow keys quickly, but when I move too fast, Houdini initiates playback in the direction I was stepping in.
I assume Houdini detects a double-tap, which is bound to start playback?

However I have not found anything in the settings to disable this behavior and this makes it impossible to quickly find a certain moment in an animation.

Can anybody help?

There is no "double-tap" implemented on the arrow keys. Perhaps it is your keyboard (low batteries?). You may be accidentally activating the up-arrow, which does start payback.

My mind must have been playing tricks on me.

Now I cannot reproduce it anymore.
I guess I really must have pushed the wrong key without noticing - is this me getting old?

Well you‘ve helped me solve this anyway, so thanks!

Ok I was definitely not imagining this - just got it again briefly.

I have no solid repro case, but it appears particularly often with imported character FBX files.
Just now on my first attempt to quickly step backwards through the timeline, the playback (backwards) activated and remained active, even I was not pressing any key. I wasn't able to reproduce it a second time after that.

I noticed that holding down the left/right arrow key activates the playback button in the GUI and releasing the key will activate the stop button. Maybe houdini misses the key release when performance is bad, or something along those lines?

If anybody else has experienced this, I'd be curious to hear about it.

saschaherfort
I noticed that holding down the left/right arrow key activates the playback button in the GUI and releasing the key will activate the stop button. Maybe houdini misses the key release when performance is bad, or something along those lines?

I'm seeing the opposite. When performance is bad, (non-trival cook time between frames), releasing the arrow key will stop stepping through frames. However during trivial playback, such as in non-animated scenes, the playback continues after lifting the key. It also happens when releasing the key after moving the mouse to certain panes, such as the render view.

It's definitely a bug, and I've found a consistent way to reproduce it, although I'm sure there are many other scenarios which trigger this.

- Create a Wrangle and have its parameters visible.
- Press and hold Right to step forwards in time quickly.
- While still holding Right, click in the Wrangle code box.

Now the playback will continue, and Houdini enters a bad state where pressing and holding the left or right key will continue playback upon releasing the key.

The only way to restore correct functionality I've found is to restart Houdini.

eikonoklastes
- Create a Wrangle and have its parameters visible.
- Press and hold Right to step forwards in time quickly.
- While still holding Right, click in the Wrangle code box.

I can confirm that this happens for me too, maybe fixing this would also fix rarer occurences of the playback mode becoming untied from the keyboard arrow keys.

Is there a way to report bugs to sidefx?

Bottom of the menu up above, under Support.