make Timer CHOP able to play in reverse

Wishlist and RFEs
1

The Timer CHOP already got lots of love last year.
It’s currently missing two features which would help enormously in using it for our installations.

A) It would be great if its speed parameter would resemble the functionality of the speed parameter on the Movie File In TOP - as in that it could also have a negative value, so the Timer CHOP can also play in reverse.

The usecase is that it would enable me to play segments forward and backwards, and also control movie index and animation lookup curves forwards and backwards, without having to resort back to complicated Speed CHOP setups. I tried to simulate this behaviour using interpolated values from custom columns in the segment DAT but this turns into very hacky scripts quite soon.

B) can the Segments DAT support a column “holdOnExit” to pause the Timer at the last frame before it exits a segment. This would mean the timer plays until the end of the segment, and does not jump already to the start of the next segment, which it does currently.
I tried to simulate this by calling timerOp.par.play = 0 in the OnSegmentExit callback, but this does not stop the timer to already go to the start of the next segment.

the usecase is that I would like to use the current segmentid (or a custom column in the Segment DAT with scene name) to control which scene my installations are in.

Thanks,
idzard

2 Likes
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  • 1
3

+1

4

+1 would turn back time

1 Like
5

+1

6

+1

7

Would love that as well!

8

+1
I like to trigger various modulations with Timers, and it would be nice to be able to go back to the original state without an abrupt jump.

1 Like
9

+1

In general, having the ability to play the timeline in both direction without any glitch, weird behaviors would be nice.

10

whats the best way to do this now?

11

Well since a while the Timer CHOP has the option to use an external CHOP as time source.
You can use that to play in reverse or rewind or scrub

example attached
timer_on_external_chop.tox (9.0 KB)

1 Like
12

oh thanks,i see how i can go reverse, but i must be missing something, the way it counts a number down isn’t accumulative, like its just mirroring the constant, I cant seem to figure out playing back from where i am when i want to “play reverse”…
its kind of the same as just using a speed and going negative.

13

Yeah…TBH i never used this feature before I made this example for you. Now I’m also a bit in doubt how useful this is. I think we would rather have a speed setting which can go to -1…

2 Likes
14

Button/trigger 0-1 into a math 0-1 = -1-1 into a speed
that essentially allows the button to Play forward and then play backwards from the “current” play head.