I have a little idea since a few days about time management in CG softwares. for now, they all manage it the same way: it is global for everything in it. every node or operator depends on the same global time. And as houdini is pushing the limits, I would like to suggest a way to pushing it ever further. you will tell me if this may be a good thing to implement or not.
For now, in houdini, you can have many panes showing you different state of your scene, which is really powerful. But all those panes show your scene at the same time t defined by the playbar. what would be great would be to be able to define for those panes different times. So, if you are working on a time-dependent effect, you could adjust parameters of an operator and being able to see immediatly the effects on times t, t+1, t+2, t+n…without having to naviguate through time. So you could work faster with a more global view a your effect.
And if you are animating a character, you could have one pane with the time being played so that you could see your animation in real time, and a second pane were you could edit the pose of your character at a specific time, those changes being reflected in the first pane. This way you do not need to click play after a change in order to see your animation, as you can see it WHILE you are making these changes.

So I believe that being able to “override” the global time for any pane could allow for a more productive work, but I am really curious and need to know what you think about it

Sounds like a fantastic idea to me.

this would be really really helpfull

Well, when you think about it, this has two potential issues. First off, I would need some way of keeping track of what's where. I'm unclear, GUI-wise, about how you would know where you are in time if there wasn't some sort of absolute current frame. When you open-end this concept, the idea of current frame becomes meaningless since any pane could be anywhere, time-wise. Don't you see this as incredibly confusing and error-prone?

Additionally, this would now mean that the pipeline needs to be structured to allow simultaneous cooking for any number of points in time. That means either having “n” copies of *everything* cooking all the time, or somehow cooking everything all the way down the range of animation every time you alter something. Either of these would be a phenomonal hit on performance.

I understand what you're looking for, however - being able to sneak a peek at something down the line. This is definitely useful, I just wonder if this needs a little less open-endedness to it. Perhaps the option of a single “preview/postview” pane(like the animation editor - there's only one) that could let you look at a different point in time. It would be expensive, processing and memory-wise, but would be nice as an option for just what you described.

Cheers,

J.C.