Targets - acidbubbles/vam-timeline GitHub Wiki

Targets are things you can animate.

Free controllers

Controllers are the green/red boxes you move around, which control the position and rotation of atoms (such as a hand, or the position of a chair). You can turn rotation or position off, which will prevent Timeline from affecting them.

If you define a parent, but still keep the controllers on, Timeline makes their animation relative to it. For example, if the right hand moves in a circular fashion around an object and is parented to it, moving that object will keep the hand animation around it. It is however recommended to use the built-in parenting feature to allow blending and per-animation parenting.

Timeline animates position vectors (x, y, and z) as well as rotation quaternions. You'll only see the position vectors in the curves viewer.

Morphs

Morphs are animated using the "float param" target. They will appear under the storable "geometry" if the fav checkbox is checked.

Float params

Float params are numeric values. They will show up as a single line in the curve viewer. Examples of such params as light intensity, skin specular, scale, morph values, hair length, etc.

Triggers

Triggers allow changing the value of any storable of any type in Virt-A-Mate. That includes booleans (on/off, e.g. collisions enabled), floats (same as float params), actions (such as playing an audio clip), strings (such as which asset to load in an asset bundle), and colors (such as skin color).

Triggers will have a start event, a transition, and an end event. Start events will run whenever the animation enters the trigger keyframe and will end whenever the next keyframe is reached. For looping animations that have a single trigger, the end event will only be called when switching to another animation.

You can create multiple trigger tracks to have many trigger transitions overlapping.

You can enable the "live" option on trigger tracks to invoke triggers when scrubbing while the animation is not playing, and to enable audio sync. This allows you to scrub and hear the audio, and play audio clips at the right time when starting an animation in the middle.

Audio

Audio tracks are simply trigger tracks with the "live" option turned on.