Timelapse toolbox

Tools for Timelapse Makers in the 3D Editor

Currently split into 7 tools, they will affect animation on the object, object-data, modifiers, shapekeys, materials and nodegroups level. Activate via pie menu with hotkey ctrl F1

Curves To Drivers

Transforms animation curves mapped to the Frame Start / Frame End of the current scene into drivers based on a property of the active pose bone. Workflow:

• • Select animated objects
  • Shift Select a bone with at least one driver you need to use
  • Press Ctrl F1 and pick Curves to Drivers from the menu
  • If you have more than one property, you will be presented with a popup to select which one to drive from, and then press OK
  • Drivers are mapped to the min and max of the property (it should be a float) from frame start and frame end
  • The original Actions are not deleted.

Drivers To Curves

The Inverse of the previous option, it will copy the drivers mapped from the min/max of the property of the active pose bone into animation curves mapped to frame start/ frame end of the current scene. Workflow:

• • select driven objects
  • Shift Select a bone with the property you are driving with
  • Press Ctrl F1 and pick Drivers to Curves from the menu
  • If the bone has more than one property, you will be presented with a menu to select the desired one
  • Curves will be created/ mapped to frame start/frame end from the min and max of that property
  • The original drivers will not be deleted, so you will need to do this if you want to see the animation.

Display to Render

It is often desirable that renderability curves/drivers for the objects or their modifiers match exactly with visibility curves. This utility simply copies them over:

• • Select driven and/ or animated objects
  • Press Ctrl F1 and select Display to Render from the menu

Render to Display

It is often desirable that visibility curves/drivers for the objects or their modifiers match exactly with renderability curves. This utility simply copies them over:

• • Select driven and/ or animated objects
  • Press Ctrl F1 and select Render to Display from the menu

Un Drive

Once you have drivers on an object it will ignore the animation in actions: In order to see it once again, you will need to remove those drivers. This utility does just that:

• • Select driven objects
  • Press Ctrl F1 and select Un Drive from the menu

Un Curve

Once you've finished creating your driven setup you may not want those extra actions hanging around, doing nothing. Use UnCurve to unlink them:

• • Select animated objects
  • Press Ctrl F1 and select Un Curve to unlink all actions from your objects

Show Bools

Coming soonish!

Tools for Timelapse in the node editor (shaders)

Create a Time Driven Group

while timelapse toolbox can directly convert material animation into drivers, this is only really good for 'one-offs': such materials will work just fine, but will be only usable for specific cases, not easily generalizable to reusable nodegroups. There is another way however: use timelapse toolbox within the node editor, to convert animated node trees into a node group with a 'time' input. This will keep your animation curves, converting them into curve nodes with the time input as Fac, preserving delicate timing you've created. Animated Color ramps can be used, Timelapse toolbox will simply convert them into nodegroups inside the main group.

Turn Ramp Node into a Group

Color ramp nodes are super useful in timelapse sequences, video to help explain: <HTML5video width="720" height="420">rembrand</HTML5video> As you can see, the color-ramp, with animation, can change a grey scale texture into a progression over time. This can be done with any of the interpolation types, so you can use a constant interpolation to make the effect of 'flakes' falling off - this can be done with an image texture or with voronoi cells texture. The following interpolation types are supported by timelapse tools:

• Linear
• Constant
• Ease

bezier and cardinal are not supported, as the math is a bit more complex. However, there is no limit to how many stops you can use, or how you want to animate them (color or position) However, each timelapse element is not available as an input, which means the only way to 'access' them is through direct driving or animation. This is inconvenient for modularisation, so timelapse toolbox can convert the ramp into a nodegroup with explicit inputs for each element (position, color, or both):

Add a new Channel to Ramp Group

Color ramp outputs are quite useful, each element will give us Color and Alpha. The latter can be used to drive (for example) a bump intensity, spec or a mix between multiple shaders. On occasion we'd like more channels per element, to use, for example, for glossiness, bump and roughness. We can't do this to a regular color ramp, but if you've already converted one to a nodegroup, you can simply click on it, hit ctrl-F1 and add a new channel from the menu.