The Woes of editing a timeline.

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Please someone tell me if I am wrong about this, but there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to edit multiple keys on the time line.

I created a light that flickers like a torch. I have many different keys in a timeline that control the brightness to simulate the flicker. When I want to edit a bunch of the keys at once things get tedious.
These are the issues I have found and keep having to deal with and it is very frustrating.

  1. there doesn’t appear to be a way to Marque select the keys. (this is really needed)

  2. I have to hold down control and click on each individual key that I want to move. This takes a lot of time when there are many keys that I have to edit at one time.

  3. As I am selecting the keys one at a time, I accidentally move keys. I then choose to undo the move and it deselects all the keys, making me have to start over re-selecting them.

  4. As I am selecting the keys one at a time, I accidentally miss clicking on a key and it deselects all the keys, making me have to start over re-selecting them.

  5. After I finally get all the keys selected and edited, I then click compile to test my tweak, it deselects all the keys again. If my tweak wasn’t what I wanted then I am again stuck having to re-select all the keys one at time just at attempt another tweak.

So I ask, is there something I am missing that will make editing a timeline easier? If not then I ask the developers to please give us a marque select option in the timeline, to select multiple keys.

2

If you’re editing all of your peak keys to set the maximum brightness, I’d suggest you use a lerp. Make all of your troughs 0 and all peaks 1, then plug the output into the alpha pin on the lerp, then set the a and b values to your min and max values. You could even plug a random float in range into your max input of the lerp making a gated flicker.

3

Agreed. Timelines are really cumbersome to use. I can’t even find a way of locking an axis (for example, I only want to move a key in the x axis, not change it’s value), but maybe I’m missing something. I actually thought that maybe all these features were in there somewhere, and I’m just being stupid.
Definitely needs improvement.

4

If I ever want to change a node in x or y, I click on it then type the values in.

5

maybe it’s better to do key splines in blender and then write a custom exporter for the spline and import to UE4 before Epic fix this.
I tried it out and it actually suck if you’d do any complex enough animation.