Has anyone thought about this?

Controlling the speed of time using an animated parameter?

I was thinking a good way would be to set the frame rate very high then use a render script to skip frames depending on the animated parameter.

(referencing a channel in the increment part of a rop doesn't work. seems to take the first value as constant)

Just wondering…

why not just use CHOPS ( Warp or TimeWarp CHOP).
and for simulations.. I think you can adjust the number of computations
between each frame and maybe keyframe it. (in the POPnet parameter page)
I hope i understand what you're trying to do….

I hadn't come across that op before. Just had a quick read. It looks like it just streches channels. If the motion was generated without a channel I think it would be unaffected. I don't think its what Im looking for.

I'm probably missing something. But if you have a non-animated parameter, then it wouldn't matter anyhow.

tell me if i'm wrong henster but what it looks like he wants to do is have a spare channel act as almost a time remapping function that you would find in non-linear editing packages…..?

for people who don't know what i'm talking about with time remapping (although im sure you all do), it is having a animation curve control the rate of speed of the film/animation… x axis would be time (secs) and y axis would be frame number.. so if you had a steep ramp, you would be going faster than normal.. a less steep incline would be slow motion. a flat line (constant) would be paused. and anything going downhill would be reverse motion (incline defines speed of reverse)…

you would still have a set frame rate for the project (probably set high as he said in original post) and then control the speed of the overall animation with the spare channel curve.. so it sounds like he doesn't want to attach the time remap (speed) curve to a single animation channel, but to the whole overall deal… with that said tho, i guess im wondering, how would generate motion without a channel? through vex or something…?


but as a answer to what i think you are asking for (i.e. a time remapping solution).. i would create a global variable… let's call it speed. i would then use $SPEED as a scalar in every single one of my animated channels..have the SPEED variable pointing to a spare channel that has your time ramp curve in it.. this would be a little different then how i explained time remapping works above because now (since it would be a scalar) anything at 1 would play at normal speed, anything above 1 would be fast motion.. 1-0 would be slow motion.. below 0 would be reverse…


hth,
dave

if this is what you are gett

Thanks for the lengthy reply deecue. Sorry I should have made it more clear. I was thinking about a more ‘output orientated’ type of control. Incidently the motion in the piece I am thinking about using the effect is entirely created in VEX making the channel thing useless.

I got it working though using hscript (which I discovered is great!). Hope you'll excuse me not pasting the code. heres the general idea:


while ( frame < last_frame ){
frame = frame + (increment got from curve in chops)
framenum = framenum +1
render frame with framenum index
}


done with very high fps.

apologies for this being rubbish.