3dsmax re-time tool - how to gradually slow down time ?

[stevesideas]

I'm currently working on an animation that involves pistons moving quickly in an engine. I need to gradually slow these down over time, then have a constant slow speed for a period and then speed up again. I can't seem to get the max re-time tool to ease in or ease out properly. The max help doesn't really give much insight into how to do this. Has anyone used this and managed to get it to work properly ?

[stevesideas]

So, here is a screenshot of the graph I'm working with. As you can see I've set up the timing and tried to use the easing but it just goes from the highest keyframe value to zero which means the animation comes to a complete stop rather than reaches the slow down speed required.

[stevesideas]

Can't seem to get this to work. I was thinking that maybe point cache could be used to vary the time of multiple objects throughout a scene but this only seems to work with caching modifiers....ahhh

[Donald2B]

How do you have this setup? Rigged?

I had to do this for a 16 cylinder motor with full functionality, including lots of speed changes. I ended up fully rigging the engine so that I only had a few keys to actually animate. From here I applied ease curves to the animation and was able to adjust the speed of the motor animation. The ease curves also gave me full curve editability so it was easy to setup the various transitions and "bullet time" like effects. It was great for revisions too, when the client came back and wanted everything slowed down by a factor of 2. Adjusted the base animation and everything else just worked from there.

I wish I could show you the rig, but still under NDA.

[stevesideas]

That sounds like a nice solution but I only have about 4 days to get this job done including rendering so I'm really up against it. I did find a script on scriptspot that has allowed me to do pretty much what I want although it does take a little while to get your head around how to use it properly and the UI is a bit confined. It did solve my problem though so useful in the end.

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/retimer

[Donald2B]

Glad you got it sorted out.

[trixian]

You can still use an ease curve, instanced, without setting up a rig if thats too time consuming.
It is rather unintuitive, but you can create a custom ease (or multiplier curve) in the track view and copy paste it as an instance onto all your animated tracks. I even think you can name them if you have multiple.

[Donald2B]

I've never tried to copy and paste an ease curve. I will have to look into that. Thanks for the tip.

[trixian]

There is actually a lot you can do in the track view when it comes to copy\paste on tracks and controllers. These are of course not echoed in in the maxscript listener, so I have no idea how to automate them.
I would love to be able to instance geometry and such through en-masse with some ui, as it lets you convert stacks to references as well as instances so you can get a pretty procedural setup going with branching stacks.