Trax and Time editor¶

Trax (the "track editor") and the Time Editor are the Designer's two surfaces for clip-level animation: composing reusable animation clips rather than authoring keys.

Why clip-level¶

A single 24-frame "wing flap" is a clip. So is a 60-frame "banner unfurl". When you have several clips, layering them together produces complex behavior without authoring more keys.

Examples:

Loop a wing flap while overlaying a one-shot wing-fold pose.
Cross-fade between a walk cycle and a run cycle.
Trigger a clip on a UI event ("when the button is clicked, play the bounce clip").

Trax editor¶

Animate > Trax Editor opens Trax. Layout:

Track list (left): stacked tracks per placement.
Timeline (right): clip bars on each track.

Drop a clip on a track by dragging from the Project Explorer's Animation Clips group. Resize a clip by dragging its right edge (stretches or scales the underlying curve). Move by dragging the middle.

Tracks blend top-down by their weight. The result is the sum (weighted) of every track on the row.

Time Editor¶

Animate > Time Editor opens the larger Time Editor view. It adds:

Clip nesting: clips can contain other clips, so you can build "phrases".
Per-clip retiming: warp a clip's internal timeline without scaling its duration.
Bake out: collapse the time editor stack to per-frame keys.

For simple authoring stay in Trax; jump to Time Editor when a clip graph gets large enough to warrant nesting.

Create a clip from existing keys¶

Select the range of keys (Dope Sheet, time slider, or Graph Editor).
Animate > Create Clip from Selection.
Name it.

The keys move into the new clip's internal timeline; the original positions on the placement timeline are replaced by a clip reference. Subsequent edits inside the clip update everywhere the clip is used.

Clip blending¶

Each clip on a track has a weight (0..1) and a blend mode:

Mode	Effect
Replace	Clip's values overwrite the lower tracks at this point
Add	Clip's offsets stack on top of lower tracks
Multiply	Clip's values multiplied with lower (useful for masks)

A typical wing-flap rig uses one Add track with "flap_base" (looping) plus a Replace track with "flap_freeze" (one-shot for the flapless moments).

Bake¶

Animate > Time Editor > Bake to Keys collapses the stack into per-frame keys on the placement. Use to:

Hand off to a renderer that does not understand clip layering.
Lock in the final composition before export.

After bake, the clips are gone and only keys remain.