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.
there doesn’t appear to be a way to Marque select the keys. (this is really needed)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You could use a random float instead… there is even a “random float in range” node.
Get a new value once in a while from that, lerp to new value and voila, no messing with timelines. You could even make the new brightness interval random as well. Not as much mucking around, just max and min values to tweak.
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.
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.