Currently, the Trail POP does not allow the creation of seamless looping videos. I may be in the minority as someone who creates a lot rendered looping videos in TD, but I do think it would be nice to have the option when the “always cook” flag is turned off. I also think this would be consistent with how the Trail CHOP functions.
A common way I create looping animations is to link everything to the timeline. Anything that has a trail or feedback effect needs to run up until the end of the timeline, with the range limit set to “once” and with the realtime flag off. Then, jumping to the start of the timeline, and recording the movie will provide a seamless loop. I’ve attached an example file that demonstrates the issue. If one repeats the steps above, the Trail POP clears its buffer, resetting the trails. This doesn’t occur when the timeline naturally loops, it seems to only happen when the timeline is paused and started again in any form.
Side note: this could be worked around in my workflow by doubling the timeline, making the timeline fraction loop twice (x2, limited to loop 0-1), and then punching in a movie file out recording at the halfway mark, though that feels less intuitive and a bit hacky.
To fix this we could add a new mode where the trail length depends on the cook number instead of being time based. Perhaps there are also other use cases where this would be useful.
First post on the alpha release, (super happy to be part of this!):
I think the Trail POP’s ‘always cook’ option should be off by default.
If you start out with this, try to create some geometry and pause TD to have a closer look/debug the trail disappears. I feel that this is s a bit inconsistent with TDs general behavior.
so currently trail POP and other time dependent POPs rely on absTime that doesn’t pause when the timeline is paused, so you’ll see some unexpected behaviors even with always cook off, we’re looking into improving that behavior