Maybe I’m being dim, but I can’t seem to preview any animation that I add to timelines other than the Main Timeline.
So, I have this character’s eyes and, in the Main Timeline, I’m moving the pupils about so he’s looking in different places. I also want him to blink. As that’s a repeated action, I set that up in a Blink Timeline and set that to start every now and then via Timeline Actions in the Main Timeline.
But it seems the only way to check that the blink is working right is to preview in the browser. If I play the preview timeline below my scene, the blink apparently doesn’t work. It’s as if I don’t have a Timeline Action there at all.
Me thinks that’s right, yes.
You can only view one timeline at the time, for a combination you need to click the preview button. Is that so much more work?
er… yeah, it is when the animation you want occurs a minute into a scene animation. Say, what I want to happen is a fraction out. I then have to roughly guess what might work to fix it and then preview again and then repeat until ok … and that for every single non-main timeline animation. It’s a royal PITA.
Also discovered that the same goes for any audio you might trigger from the main timeline. That seems so wrong, I’m wondering what I’m doing wrong, not what Hype is doing wrong.
And it’s unintuitive; if you are triggering another timeline in the main timeline, you would expect that behaviour to be shown there. Otherwise, what’s the point in it being called the main timeline. It might as well be “a timeline”.
These are good points, but there are a lot of behaviors and ambiguities that would arise by attempting to run timeline actions. (Property ownership, scrubbing inconsistencies, javascript, relative timelines, just to name a few). In this regard the editor is only for editing the current timeline. You are correct that the main timeline is not special, aside from the fact that it automatically is started when the scene is loaded. (And from an editor perspective, its current playhead position is the basis for the property values when viewing other timelines).
Beyond previewing the current scene, another mechanism that may work for you is that Symbol Actions will generally be reflected on the present timeline. So if you have an Eye symbol, you could have its parent timeline play a timeline with a blink multiple times and you would see that.
I would at least like to have audio previews though!
