Timeline
As we mentioned in the introduction the Timeline has been rewritten and we applaud the decision MAXON took in doing this rather than trying to enhance the old Timeline that was unchanged since Release 8. By rewriting it just as they have done with the Character Animation system it was an opportunity to do it right and give us what many people have been asking for and more. There's so much that's new and enhanced that we can't possibly cover everything in this review. However we'll try to cover and demonstrate the major features and enhancements.
Pretty much the first thing that you encounter apart from the totally new look is that sequences have gone. This is good and bad. The bad news is that you can't as easily loop sequences as you could before for say 5 loops. Currently you would do this in R10 by using the cycle function which essentially copies and pastes keyframes and thus increases the file size. The good news is that without sequences you do have quite a bit more flexibility. You can create virtual sequences just by selecting keyframes as mentioned in the Animation Controls section or by using the new region tool. With these virtual sequences you can move them around scale them and now copy and paste over part of the same virtual sequence. The latter being something that couldn't be done in R9. The other thing that has gone is Motion Blending. Mocca 2 introduced motion blending and while it was pretty clunky it did work however blending more than 2 mocap files took a bit of work to achieve. With sequences we also had a primitive NLA system (Non Linear Animation) that allowed retiming. So with no sequences and no motion blending one gets the feeling that there's more to come in functionality for the Timeline. In fact some of the Beta testers have let slip that there's more coming in another forum. However R10 and the Timeline were probably at the point where MAXON chose to release R10 in its current state as it was pretty much finished. The old Morph track has gone as well and I doubt many people will miss it as it was quite limited in its functionality and using a Posemixer or now the Morph tag is far superior. So apart from these couple of issues the rest is all good news and we'll spend the rest of this section looking at the major highlights.
The Release 10 Timeline
Rather than write pages of text trying to describe the major features of the Timeline let's have a look at a few short videos which demonstrate things much better. There are hotlinks under each letter. Just click the letter on the image above to load the video. If you would prefer to download and save the videos to your hard disk, I've combined all of the videos for the Timeline and F Curves into one zipped download. You can download this video here. The following is a summary:
A - Layers and Solo mode (2min 39 sec 1.5mb)
B - Animation On / Off(4min 36 sec 4.3mb)
C - Key Muting / Unmuting (1min 57sec 1.7mb)
D - Collapsing Tracks and Master Keys(2min 44sec 1.1mb)
E - Visual Key Types (2min 59 sec 1.7mb)
F - Region Tool (2min 36sec 1.0mb)
G - Ripple Editing (2min 39sec 1.5mb)
H - Show Animated Objects (1min 30sec 1.0mb)
I - F Curves See F Curve section below
J - Search Bar & Bookmarks (2min 28sec 1.4mb)
K - Path Bar (4min 43sec 3.1mb)
L - Filter (7min 3.5mb)
M - Create new Timeline (41 sec 620kb)
N - Timeline Move Tool (45 sec 1.3mb)
O - Timeline Scale Tool & Link View to Preview Range (1min 45sec 1.6mb)
If you don't watch all of the videos, in the Ripple editing video I show that Ripple editing is only partially working correctly. It works fine when moving keyframes but doesn't work correctly when copying keyframes. I've spoken to MAXON about this and they acknowledge there is a problem but that it won't be fixed until the next major upgrade and not in the 10.1 update. A little bit unsatisfactory in my opinion but my guess is that some of the other Timeline enhancements that they may be working on mean that at this time they can't fix it.
Several other little enhancements are worth mentioning. From the view menu you can display track values. These values are the value of each track at the current time. I should also mention that from the same menu you can hide the Key symbols (key types - e.g. linear, step or spline) You can quickly edit a key's value by double clicking on it and entering the new value. There's a "Show Vector Track" option that is enabled by default. When this is disabled and you expand the Position master track for example to show the 3 axes, the Master Position track is hidden until you collapse the individual tracks down. Another one is the "Show Branches" option. When enabled this essentially places objects etc in the Timeline into folders for better organization of complex scenes. You also get extra folders like tags etc.
Show Track Values & Quick Key Editing
One more new feature worth mentioning is Before and After. This is similar to looping that's now gone except there's more options and it's very similar to cycling except you don't get the keyframes. In the image below a cube is animated over 20 frames. With offset repeat enabled for the after option the cube continues to move in a similar motion but starts where it finishes. Other options include the standard repeat which is just the same as looping then there's oscillate, constant (default), off and continue. Continue is an interesting one in the object will continue to move in the the direction that the curve is at. The only negative with Before & After and that is you can't specify the number or repeats / loops as you could with Loops in earlier versions. This is a major draw back and I would hope that MAXON addresses this in a future upgrade. The work around is to use the cycle option that is pretty much the same as it was in Release 8 and 9. The problem with cycling is that actual keyframes are created and therefor the file size can increase substantially.
Before and After
F Curves
There is now no stand alone F Curve manager (Function Curve Manager). It is now incorporated into the Timeline. You can now have a maximum of 4 Timeline windows and these can be in either track view or F Curve view. This should be handy for character animating where each character could have it's own Timeline / F curve window. Like the Timeline the F Curve editor / manager has beencompletelyy rewritten but it's not nearly as radical as all of the Timeline enhancements. I got the feeling that hidden under the hood the F curve engine is . The clamp option in the parameters works much better than before for example and editing is much smoother. As before there's a mini F Curve under each track that allows simple editing but I've never really bothered with this. To get the full F Curve editor you just select the button on toolbar or more simply press the space bar. Pressing the space bar toggles between the the Timeline and the F Curve editor.
We'll have a look a couple of the major enhancements in more detail below but it's worth mentioning a couple of very useful minor enhancements. First one is that as you select keys the value of the key is displayed. Great for tweaking things. Another one is breaking tangents. Previously you had to hold the shift key down to adjust tangent handles and you still can but I found using the break tangent handle command was a superior way to work.
In Release 9 (and Release 8 since the Timeline and F Curves had no enhancements) we had a command to make selected keys have soft interpolation. This is replaced by the "Spline" key command. In addition there's now an "Auto tangent" option. This means that as you move keys around the tangent will will remain perpendicular to the curve and the length will automatically adjust for the smoothest interpolation. In R9 you had to run the Soft Interpolation command every time you changed things to make the tangents do this. Auto tangents are much better as they update in real time and the animated image below shows the tangent updating in real time.
Auto Tangents
Let's take a look at 3 cool new enhancements in the image below of the Release 10 F Curve editor.
Release 10 F Curve Editor
A Move Curve - Quite a handy tool. By selecting this tool you can move an entire F-curve around in the editor. There is no need to select keys, just click anywhere on the curve and drag it. Make sure that you have frame snapping on when you do this and possibly Y axis snapping.
B Snapshots - Want to mess around with your F Curve and then revert back to it or want a visual reference of what the original looked then snapshots is the answer. You basically take a snapshot of the selected curve or curves with the "Create Snapshot" command. You then can edit and change your curve around. The snapshot needs to be made visible with the "View Snapshot" command if you want to see it however you wont see anything until you make changes as the snapshot is under the original curve. You then have the option to revert back to the original curve by doing a "Swap Snapshot" command which swaps the Snapshot with the real curve. In the image above the Snapshot is shown by the black line. The Snapshot tool has no options so it is very easy to learn and use.
C Min / Max lines - These are shown in the image as the red dotted lines extending horizontally to the scale on the left hand side from the maximum and minimum values on the F-curve. You can adjust the minimum or maximum value bydraggingg on this line anywhere including in the scale on the left hand side - slick!! (By the way this line can be hidden. Just go into the new Timeline / F-curve options in the preferences). To support this we now get optional Y axis (vertical scale) snapping. This was one serious deficiency in the R9 F-curve manager.
If you would prefer to download and save the videos to your hard disk, I've combined all of the videos for the Timeline and F Curves into one zipped download. You can download this video here.
Timeline Conclusion
To conclude this section, things have changed and been improved so much that if you're like me, when I first started using the new Timeline I found it a bit overwhelming to begin with. Things are a lot different and the changes significant particularly for the track section. All I can say is work your way through the help system, experiment and learn one or two things at a time and soon you wouldn't want to go back to using the R9 Timeline or as the case is, the Release 8 Timeline.