controlling a looped animation

Noob alert!

I'm creating a short presentation using a scrolling timeline at the bottom of the screen.

I've managed this, which seems about right (merge node is set to wrap):



Looping the animation with a transform node is no problem, however I would like to have the animation slow down, speed up, stop and start again at certain frames. I know I could loop splines and edit them by hand but perhaps there is an easier way?

So what is supposed to make the timeline advance?

The beauty of the extrapolation of animated values in Fusion is that your Displacement in the motion path doesn't have to be between 0 and 1.
Once you made a looped patch of the timeline, you can keep increasing the Displacement in your Transform's animation path to any crazy values.
So, your motion path may stay short, but the Center will shift further beyond it.

The idea behind this is to streamline the workflow. I know for a fact there wil be *many* revisions, so I believe if there is a way to keyframe start/stop and fast/slow, then I will have to just have to edit those keyframes vs tweaking the spline.

That is not so easy as it seems.

I can't think of a way to implement this without a script or something like a custom modifier/tool.

The problem is how can you can't easily reference the value of the last frame, where it would need to do the same. This would rather work like a particle system or trails where you additive evaluate based on the state and therefore is not predictable.

You can not on an Input called Position do: self:GetValue("Position", time -1)
This will fail even on the second frame if you add an " or 0".

There is no concept of a local variable that increments each frame. This (like in a trails tool) can be implemented in a Fuse however. There is a special parameter in the SDK docs that specifically tells Fusion that this Tool is not predictable.
EDIT: The tags for the tool is REG_TimeVariant (rerender every frame, but cache) and REG_Unpredictable

A different approach would be scripting.
You animate a Parameter like SpeedUp/SlowDown and the script, based on this animation calculates the values.

Time Machine is capable of doing that. You can drive the transform position with its Delta mode.

http://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckle ... p?f=6&t=74

What Pieter says™