frame range starting 1001.

[William Jeffers]

Hi Guys,

So the comp team want us to switch to frame numbers that begin at 1001 (instead of 1). This makes a lot of sense (working with re-edits etc...) when we are working on more frames than was originally calculated. 

Can anyone give me some pointers to how people are setting this up in maya? I would obviously want this automatically setup as a default on the timeline. But I guess we would need it to work well in all editors that have a timeline (graph editor, trax, etc...)

Will we run into any problems with dynamics (nDynamics? etc...) or plugins like Fume/ golaem? 

I know a lot of studios are working like this. So just wanted to get the pros and cons before making the switch. 

Cheers

Will

[matt estela]

Yep, we've run like this for years and years, across multiple software packages. No problems that I'm aware of. 

I think for sim and whatnot we don't do anything special, it's up to the user to make sure their sim start time is something sane (Houdini generally sets sim start time to the first frame of the timeline by default, not sure if Maya does the same, or even allows you drive that as a user preference). 

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[Alexandre Pillon]

Hi William,

It is very easy to change the start frame for particles/nParticles, directly in the attribute editor /  Time attributes.

As for Golaem (yes I work there!), we have a similar setting in the CrowdManager (see http://golaem.com/content/doc/golaem-crowd-documentation/crowd-manager)

Just set 1001 instead of 1 here, and you are good.

I can confirm lots of our customers are working the same way as what your comp team requests.

Cheers,

Alex 

[Stephen]

It's almost standard practice. It also makes it easy to accommodate for handles and run up time for dynamics ( which is great , cause if you need 100 frames of run up, you don't have to go negative , or slide entire scene animation ).   

  You can set you render settings to what you want and make it a preset for everyone , or set it as a scene setup script , or tie it into your project management software of choice.   

  And I think you can set it in new scene prefs under time line.  (Not in front of Maya at the moment ) 

  Dynamics all has start time settings , just not sure about MASH. I don't know how it's dynamic nodes (like jiggle ) handle start time 

-=s 

[jon parker]

What everyone else said, it should be fairly painless and there are
plenty of benefits.

Add a command in userSetup.mel to set it when you start Maya.

-Jon

[Morgan Loomis]

There can be some annoying side effects for animators if your puppets have driven keyframes, since they show up around zero in the graph editor so it can make it so you can't frame your animation curves. In that case they'll need to set those to not display in the graph editor, Show>Attributes>Keyable

[William Jeffers]

Thanks for the tips guys! Really helpful. 

Morgan - yeah I was really wondering how this effects the animators. So I am keen to know the small annoyances that will make the team hate the change.

Matt - I defo need to look into having the dynamics default to 1001. Would be just one less thing to forget. I'll check it out. 

Anyone else have any other pointers? 

Cheers!

Will

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[Andres Weber]

When rigging there are slightly annoying things if you're embedding cached cycles into it (like some sort of fake wind on a balloon).  Those should start at 1 instead of 1001 since the retiming can get annoying to have another variable affect things like speed depending on whether you use geocaching or alembics etc both have their own way of affecting what the current frame is on the cache which have their own nuances...  But this is the only thing I've run into constantly...otherwise everything's fine.