Half frames

How do I go to half frames?

For example, I want to set the timeline to frame 4.5

I don’t think you can - set the frame rate to twice what it is now and use frame 9. Why do you want to do this - a frame generates an image for that time in the animation, if you want an image halfway between two frames that you have now, you must double the frame rate, to generate twice as many frames for the given time of the animation. The the odd number frames will be halfway between the original frames of the animation.

Cheers, Clock.

Although that works, now try frame 1.2452321 and then frame 4.7238383 all on the same file.

Trust me, there are reasons it’s necessary. I won’t go into all the reasons but sometimes you MUST have keys in between frames and there is NO getting around it. I found a workaround without going to the frame, but what a giant pain! It seems as though the timeline frames are integers! When I have keys between frames and I hit jump to next keyframe in the timeline, it jumps, but rounds to the nearest whole number. Yikes.

Hi,

I understand your pain. Unfortunately, there’s a tradeoff involved here between having tools fail for the majority of use cases, and being able to cater for motionblur / action-constraint setup. Specifically, you’d be amazed how often we’d have problems with “.001 frames off” problems causing near-duplicate keyframes to get inserted next to each other, keyframe indicators/etc. not showing up, duplicate keyframes not getting removed in the animation editors, and many other quirks like these.

Given that in current master, the timeline does now support scrubbing in sub-frame precision (e.g. for previewing motion blur), it’ll probably make sense for us to look into these issues again for 2.8. IIRC, that toggle is currently a per-timeline option, but if we migrate it to being a toolsetting option, and then add support for subframe precision in other places (e.g. the insert keyframes and jump to next/prev keyframes in particular), things might get easier.

In the meantime, if inserting keys on the nearest frame and sliding them into place isn’t really an option, one last thing you could try is to play with the old/new frame range mapping (see “Time Remapping” in the Dimensions panel). It’s kindof clunky, and in some cases confusing, but for at least some of what you’re doing, it might help. Another “not-so-nice-but-it-will-do” workaround is to use the NLA to temporarily stretch the action (just don’t go past a 100x ratio though, or else you’ll start loosing precision).

Hope that helps,
Aligorith

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Thanks for the reply. I really hope this and some of the other little things can be worked out sometime. Blender is sooooo close for me to be able to switch to. I’m really hoping on some projects coming up to use it more. Just a few things that hold me back such as this. Thanks.

So at 24fps you need to be able to work to the nearest 1/240,000,000th of a second - sorry I don’t get that. If you know where something must be say on frame 20 and you know where it must be on frame 21 - why doesn’t this suffice? If I want something to be at say x = 9.8 on frame 21.73 I can keyframe it to be at x = 9.91 on frame 20 and 9.85 on frame 21 - So I am saying draw a line that goes through where you need to be at some fraction of a frame, then where that line crosses an integer frame each side and work out what the keyframe value would be - does this provide a workaround?

Example below:


If this is no good, then I am lost as to why you need this facility…

Cheers, Clock.

One reason would be because the high paid attorneys for large manufacturers decide those keys must be there. Not me. As I said, there are many reasons this would be needed.

I completely understand how it all works. I understand that the rendered images will fall on the whole frames. This doesn’t change the fact that the data must be there and a person must be able to manipulate it with ease.

When a client says it must be there and you explain why it really will suffice without, but they say put it there anyway, it’s not my place to ask “why”. (I understand why they want it. Not knowing what the end result is may be confusing for some, but a reason really does exist). I can easily get the keys there, just can’t position the timeline there which makes things harder.

Surely all that is required is to be able to enter non-integer values for the X position of the cursor in the Graph Editor:


Then you can read the value from the Transform or what ever box has the keyframes, as you say, you can move the keyframes to where you want them (like frame 315.2 as below, I just edited this box - not really a big pain):


  • I cannot see this is a big problem to change the code thus, particularly if there was a Checkbox to say “On Frame” for example, so you had a choice of exact numbered frame or not… Maybe someone could write a quick Python script to do this as an Add-on?

Cheers, Clock.

hey i have same issue about that and
I did not understand anything about up there
can you help me please if youre still online ?

For my particular issue, I’m using drivers instead of the timeline as a workaround.

All the movements in the scene are linked to an object’s x position, and I move the object along the x axis to get everything where I need it to be. So a half frame would be like x position = 234.5, quarter frame = 234.25, etc.

But that only works well as long as everything is moving simply. Not sure what you’d do with, say, water flowing and that type of thing.