I have not found any tools for this so I assume this would be a new feature request.
Time dilation tracks are used heavily as a quick way to eyeball a timing change without having to adjust the timing of every component animated in the scene. Yet it doesn’t publish/export with that timing. Is there any way to get the time dilation to be baked into the scene? Right now the manual processes and very technical and brain bending. The play rate of animation clips are adjusted in a different place/way than keys and if you have a character with many chopped up and blended anim sequences, then we need to bake it out first which removes any originality for future editing. Layered control rigs don’t bake down very well unless you use Take Recorder, but that process is cumbersome as well and doesn’t bake in the time dilation timing. And that doesn’t include the fact that we need to apply this to every animated component in the scene for possibly multiple scenes that were time dilated to different degrees.
Please let me know if you have any questions to things for me to try out. Thank you so much for your time.
If you are using MRG, this was addressed in Unreal 5.6. I can pass along CLs if you need, but there are quite a few changes to the engine and it might not include everything you need. but let me know.
This should cover most of the issue, in perforce the changes would be:
39736426 - MovieGraph: Add support for time dilation in renders.
39731464 - World: Add support for disabling Time Dilation in GetEffectiveTimeDilation() without modifying any of the time dilation values; When disabled, time dilation can still be set via existing functions, but calling GetEffectiveTimeDilation() will return 1.0, indicating no time dilation.
Let me know if this helps. And just to reiterate these changes are in 5.6.
Hi Dustin! We just had one of our developers look at the changelist and this seems to only help with renders if I understand correctly? I was hoping there was a something that helps with baking down keys and animation sequences to encompass the time dilation changes so we can remove the time dilation track and still maintain the same timing in the animation that we had with it on. Maybe there is more to MRG powers that I am not aware of. If so, I would love a little break down of what I need to do to make this happen.
Apologies for the delay in response, Epic has been on summer break.
I misunderstood your request a bit, I assumed the “publish/export” was meant for MRQ. This workflow isn’t supported outside of what you mentioned and would be a feature a request. Is there a specific reason you need to bake down the time dilation? Just so I can understand your workflow requirements?
Let me know if I should make a separate ticket under feature request.
Yea, so we export as fbx or usd from all our scenes to the anim department that is in Maya with all their bespoke tools. They use the exported camera and character animation as the reference/starting point for their work. Currently if the Unreal artists use time dilation to drive time ramps in their scenes to pitch to the directors and editorial, we’d love for a way to bake those time dilation changes down to the scene so that we can remove the time dilation track and either keep working in our scene or export to the Anim Dept and they get a 1:1 reference between the renders from MRQ and the FBX/USD they import into their Maya scene. Let me know if you’d like me to clarify more. Thanks!