Timeline 5 Beta

It has been a while since I have done a public announcement on Timeline 5's progress, we're in beta now! Timeline 5 is stable and while I still have a few things to fix, you can consider using it today. I should announce an official release date later. This version improves mocap capabilities, it also contains a lot of user interface improvements and a few major features like transition fade, built-in pose support and much more. The release notes are quite long, here's a quick overview of the main ones:

• Zoom animations
• Collapsible dope sheet groups
• Leap Motion fingers recording
• High resolution mocap recording
• Reposition animations
• Per-animation poses
• Fade transitions
• Split, merge and better add animations
• Cross-layer animation sets sync
• Keybindings improvements
• Diagnostics tools
• Improved keyframe reduction
• Way more...

Here is the latest version: Timeline 5.0.0-beta-10

This was a huge undertaking, and again thank you everyone who took the time to not only report problems and share ideas, but take the time to help me understand fairly complex issues (Spacedog and Hazmhox gave quite big chunks of their time to help me through particularly hard problems, and a lot more of you were nice and patient as I walked through hundreds of comments, issues, suggestions and feedback, even though it might take some time!)

What happened in the last few months?

I've been on a series of plugins to allow for better scenes. Glance, Embody, DesktopLeap, SpawnPoint and Timeline 5 are all pieces of the big puzzle I'm trying very hard to assemble. I also released a few experimental scenes, Intimate Sex, Chloe Touch, and the Glance demo scene with micromovements.

Next steps

I'll obviously finish Timeline 5, which will certainly involve one or two builds (as far as I know there aren't any big issues remaining and a few small ones), and update the documentation.

I'll then try to release some accumulated scenes. Two giantess futa scenes, one lesbians scene, and one futa female pov scene at the very least. I also really want to work on a good fingers motion scene, for those who remember my first DesktopLeap demos, there is much potential there, after all this is why I made Timeline's finger motion recording in the first place!

Then I have a ton of things in my Trello board; new plugin ideas, a way of walking around when using Embody without Vive trackers, other Timeline improvements, especially around the UI... there are way too many so I need to prioritize them. As usual, if there's something you're looking for, please let me know! I can't do everything but hearing what you're looking for helps me put things in perspective.

Detailed Timeline 5 Release Notes

Improved UI: Zoom & Full-height curves and more improvements

• Pan & zoom your animation so you can work on longer and more detailed animations
• The dope sheet now uses much more vertical space
• Collapse target groups in dope sheet (selected targets will stay visible) https://imgur.com/2NYxr9T
• The curve view can now be toggle swapped with the dope sheet
• Separate float params by storable (e.g. morphs and fingers shown separately)
• Open popups near the bottom of the screen upwards so they are actually usable https://imgur.com/D3kZBRq
• Strip "plugin" prefix in dope sheet storables headers

Improved Mocap: High resolution recording, fingers recording and more features

• Record Leap Motion fingers animations
• Record mocap animations directly in Timeline
• Playback in real time instead of game time, for e.g. music sync
• High resolution recording (up to 1000 fps), UI will support it
• Record morphs and float params
• Configurable timer before starting recording
• Ability to animate a control based on the camera raycast (projected on where you're looking in real time, e.g. to animate depth of field's AutoFocusPoint using MacGruber's PostMagic) https://twitter.com/acidbubblesanon/status/1420952683335278595
• Infinite record (auto-expands recording), at least until you run out of memory
• During recording, show the current recording time
• Show start markers during recording (same as VaM's)
• When recording, optionally switch all atoms to real time for reliable timing
• Reposition full animations (so you can mocap things, align them, sequence them and blend them)

Per-animation pose

• Per-animation poses can be used to quickly move from a clip to another without physics wobbling into position, and you can also optionally use this to completely replace pose triggers, allowing you to create animations with different settings and pose within the same scene https://twitter.com/acidbubblesanon/status/1420585512881033218
• When adding a new controller target, every animation that has a pose will default to the pose's position and rotation https://twitter.com/acidbubblesanon/status/1420952982250741760
• Copy and paste poses between clips
• Poses can be configured for root control, morphs and/or bones/controls
• Pose can optionally use merge load
• Automatically waits for physics to settle after loading a pose to avoid breaking colliders

Much improved keyframe reduction

• Detects flat areas such as feet on the ground
• Backup and restore animation
• Staged keyframe removal
• Improved algorithm
• Works for float params and for controllers

Adding animations

• Split animations at scrubber position and merge animations https://imgur.com/laB1N8w
• Ability to create new animations with or without carrying the previous animation settings https://imgur.com/TQahOEO
• When creating animation, you can now name them, decide where they should be inserted (first, previous, next or last in layer) and whether to create them in other atoms (they should be inserted in the correct spot)

Animation sets

• Animation sets, allows syncing animations on multiple layers, so when any layer enter the sets, all other layers will also transition; this will also make scrubbing work on specific animations of other layers rather than always using the first animation.
• Randomizing animations over multiple layers when they share the same name will now randomize evenly on all layers
• Configure the probability of animations within a randomized group

Keybindings integration

• Lock and unlock Timeline
• Navigation animations in the main layer
• Navigation animations in the current layer
• Navigate layers
• Set curve type to smooth (local/global), linear or flat

Hazmhox Vamoverlays integration

• hazmhox's VAMOverlay integration (automatic transition fade, also used for improved mocap record counter)

Other

• Diagnostics: Find all instances of Timeline quickly in your scene and detect hard-to-guess problems automatically, like mismatched preserve loop or speeds https://imgur.com/ktozNPq
• Logging: Show exactly what is happening in your scene
• Add targets by highlighting them in the scene instead of using the drop down
• Keyframe all float params (all or selected) at once in advanced keyframe tools
• You can now toggle the first keyframe to apply it (e.g. to persist something after loading a pose or when using Comply)
• New trigger to navigate animations on the first layer (next/previous)
• Greatly reduce the cost of the in-game curve previews and make them lighter
• Lock the plugin UI when the Atom or the plugin is disabled
• Change the behavior of the Animations storable to reset to empty (so it can be called again) and to actually switch the current animation
• Various performance, stability and quality of life enhancements

Full resolution for some of the videos: https://mega.nz/folder/moQ0jRDY#hBO4QSt1TeujYEUYDTw1Aw