I’ve got a strange problem with previewing my animation in the 3D window. Up until recently (ie, a few hours ago) playing my animation was very smooth if a bit crappy. But now, when I hit Alt+a it plays the animation, and when it reaches the last frame it pauses for a very noticeable fraction of a second before looping.
I’ve also noticed that if instead of pressing Alt+a I go to the timeline window and select “Play Back Animation” from the View menu, there’s no problem. I can’t think of what I might have messed up to cause this, does anyone else have an idea?
Coutsos…maybe setting your end frame # back a few frames …say form 120 to 118 may smooth out the loop. If is was OK and now not…probably something else.
I did try that, just for the heck of it. But it doesn’t seem to be due to the frames at all. It’s not just the animation, all of Blender pauses when it reaches the last frame. For example, if I’m using middle-mouse to rotate the scene in the 3D view while the animation plays, the rotating will also pause when it reaches the last frame. And as I said, if I do “Play Back Animation” from the View menu in the Timeline window I don’t get this issue.
I think, if I recall correctly, this is a calculation-buffering issue in blender. Namely, during Alt+A playback, it doesn’t bother calculating the first frame until it actually reaches the end and has to loop back. This causes a momentary pause as it recalculates the first frame. The timeline was designed to overcome this issue, automatically buffering the first few frames as it approaches the end to get a smooth loop. I haven’t looked over the blend file myself (very slow connection here), but I expect that’s what your problem is just from your description. Don’t worry, if that’s all it is then that wouldn’t show up in an animated render.
I know it won’t show up in a render, but that doesn’t mean as much since I won’t be rendering anyways. I was just hoping if I could avoid this annoyance while working in Blender. Sure, I could play the animation from the menu and have no problems, but by now I’ve learned to use Alt+a like I’ve learned to climb stairs.
I wonder if Tuhopuu might not have this issue? EDIT: nevermind, after some searching I found out why I haven’t heard anything about Tuhopuu in so long
(And, I still don’t get how this came up suddenly and won’t go away…)
I had this issue for as long as I can remember. If it is fixable, I do hope they would get around to fixing it. It’s very distracting to visualize a looping animation this way.
On a slightly related topic (playing back animations), how do you change the playback speed of the rendered animation when you press the play button on the animation panel? You can change the frame rate of the animation in the 3d window through the timeline window, but not the frame rate of the animation when played back in the render window. Anybody have a tip for this? Or should it go to the wishlist…
how do you change the playback speed of the rendered animation when you press the play button on the animation panel
I’ve never seen this documented anywhere, but when you PLAY a rendered animation, you can press Numpad 1 through 9 to change the speed; I don’t know the exact ratios, but 7-9 slow it down a lot. You can also LMB-drag in the play window while it’s playing and “scrub” the animation.
It isn’t seem to be working for the rendered playback. I usually do small gif animations with Blender and I set the playback very slow, like 2 or 3 frames per second. Pressing the Play button (under the Anim/Do sequence/Render daemonbuttons in the Anim panel) doesn’t give me this, even after setting the frames/sec to 2 or 3. The 3d window with Alt A does, though…
CD38, I was posting a reply before I saw your tip.
Yes, pressing 7 or 8 on the numpad does slow it down. I didn’t know that, as well as LMB dragging on the play window. Very nice. But it would be nicer if the playback is synchronized with the frames/second setting.
