I'm interested in knowing how to use the Animated Strip Time in the NLA Editor. From Alrik's answer to this question, I thought it could be used to do turn a strip into something like slo-mo that's easy to adjust. The only info. I have though on this is from here, that Strip Time is all about determining influence "over what time".
What I did was made a cube, made a strip where the action is the cube moving diagonally. I played around with 2 keyframes on animated influence, and that worked out fine, but one I checkmarked the Strip Time and added a keyframe at .5, the cube doesn't move at all. I thought .5 would slow down the animation to half speed.
How can I use the Animated Strip Time option to do, well, whatever it's meant for, if not slowing down animation times?
2 Answers
Came across the same issue trying to use it. Whenever I made a keyframe it would resort back to 0 and wouldn't animate.
I contacted the developer and it turns out this was a bug. It has now been fixed and it seems to be working fine on the latest daily build, which you can download from here:
https://builder.blender.org/download/
UPDATE: Currently with the latest release (2.7a), you can only get it to work using the Graph Editor.
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$\begingroup$ Thanks for the help. The link shows a 404 error. Do you have another one? I also tried it on the release Blender 2.78a for windows, 64 bit. I wasn't able to change the Influence and Strip Time float numbers, even if I keyframed them once. $\endgroup$ Jan 21, 2017 at 8:34
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$\begingroup$ No problem, the fix isn't on the official release yet, so you'll need to download the latest daily build for the moment. Here is the link which lists them - builder.blender.org/download $\endgroup$ Jan 22, 2017 at 13:11
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$\begingroup$ Today's build on win32 and 64 is still making the animated influence glitch back to 0, keyframe or not. Is it working for you? $\endgroup$ Jan 24, 2017 at 20:05
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$\begingroup$ You're right, It seems the latest release (2.78a) hasn't come with the fix from the daily build I had originally linked to, and this seems to have now been removed. However, on the latest version, I did manage to get it to work using the graph editor just by doing ctrl+click, does that work for you? I've added a screenshot in my answer. FYI the developer's contact info is here - link $\endgroup$ Jan 29, 2017 at 18:47
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$\begingroup$ Ya, I can keyframe both "Animated Influence" and "Strip Time" in the Graph editor. However, the cube isn't moving. It only moves when I uncheck the "Animate" checkbox on top of "Strip Time" in the NLA Editor. Is it moving for you? Here's my desktop screenshot link. Alright, thanks for the link. I can email the dev with a video. $\endgroup$ Jan 29, 2017 at 23:49
Please verify your graph keyframes are in the meaningful range.
The action extents in your screen capture are
0-92
thus the meaning values that can keyed in your graph are
0-92.
Time value here means the frame numbers of the designated action.
Time value here does [not] mean 0-1 in general.
The range of your graph depicted in your question shows very little change or none at all. Value .5 with no other keyframe visible. Two visible keyframes would probably suit you better. Your graph should show non-zero slope somewhere for movement.
The testing of time here is complicated by combining it with influence. You may want to test separately.
The NLA playback settings ... Scale and Repeat may be the simplest approach for your needs.
As a more unlikely case I have a NLA strip with an action with keys of 680-720. Thus my meaningful time graphs would have keyed values of 680-720. Some not so meaningful (and misleading to the casual reader) values might be 0-500 which would by math.maximum map to 680-680. The small, out of range, values become the same value at different frames in mapped time. A similar result would happen if large, out of range values were specified in the graph editor.
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$\begingroup$ When you're talking about "graph keyframes are in the meaningful range" and graph showing "little change", did you mean the Strip Time graph? I opened the file I used to ask the question, and varied my Strip Time graph by a lot (adding keyframes in the 10s range), and I got movement, which I'm happy to see now. Do you have other info. that can explain what this Animated Strip Time does? It's been a year since I asked this question, and I forgot a lot of Blender and the context here, but I'm still curious about what it is in general. $\endgroup$ Aug 11, 2017 at 0:52
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