Isotropix Forums

Hello!

I'm a bit of a newbie, so I apologise if this is naive -- but is there a way to access the project/timeline Start and End frames in an SeExpr expression? For example the values in the project Preferences and seen in the timeline widget?

Thank you!

Hi,

It's not so naive, and unfortunately it's not possible for the moment. Would you mind telling why you need that ? (there might be some workarounds)

I'd like to write an expression that rotates my model 360 degrees across whatever I have the timeline set to. I can do this by hand of course, but I'd like to create something reusable.

More generally, this would be handy for managing a scene in a shot context. I can imagine referencing this in the First/Last Frame parameters of an Image, adjusting timings for Alembic files, etc. I know I could do this through shell env variables but on production I've very often found use for constructing expressions from the timeline.

Ok, understood.

A partial solution is to use the variable editor and create a `start_frame` and `end_frame` variables: then you'll be able to use their values directly in any expressions.
Note that it will even work if you reference another project: the expressions of the referenced project will use the `start_frame` value of the current one.

Edit: if you need to start and end frame values to stay local to a project even if it's referenced in another one with different start and end frame values, you can put the values in custom attributes of a locator somewhere in the scene, and get the values using get_double("project://path/to/the/locator.start_frame") ...

To summarize: you can create "global" control variables in 2 ways:
- in the variable editor: those are real globals. They apply to every expression, no matter where the expression comes from.
- create a settings object with custom attributes, and use get_*() methods to access them. When a project using this is referenced in another one, the expression will stay the same, even if the "parent" project has its own settings object with different values.

Regards,
Damien.