Preview Range is a useful tool for animating (espcially on longer timelines). It allows you to only run through a limited set of frames to quickly preview the timing of a section of movement without going through the whole timeline. It means you don't have to set/reset start/end frame for rendering everytime you wish to only preview a region of frames.
Hi Ton,
Attached is a patch (I know you've already got lots of them in the tracker ;-) ) for a feature that I've sometimes wanted. It seems that this sort of thing is supported in other packages, but I can't be sure.
Note: I may have left in a few bits and pieces I didn't mean to in the patch (this is off a source tree which had quite a few revisions in it, all of which was experimental)
== Preview Range ==
Preview range is useful for animating (espcially on longer timelines). It allows you to only run through a limited set of frames to quickly preview the timing of a section of movement without going through the whole timeline. It means you don't have to set/reset start/end frame for rendering everytime you wish to only preview a region of frames.
* 'Ctrl P' in Action/NLA/Timeline sets preview range. Click+drag to form selection-box defining region of frames to preview
* 'Alt P' in Action/NLA/Timeline to clear preview range
* 'Pre' button beside Start/End fields in timeline toggles whether start/end fields refer to scene or preview
* 'Ctrl Rightarrow' and 'Ctrl Leftarrow' jump to start/end of preview region when it is set
* 'S' and 'E' set the start/end frames of preview region when it is set (just like normally) in Timeline only
* In Action/NLA editors, frames out of preview region are now drawn darkened when preview-region is set
See the following page for more info later:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Aligorith/Preview_Range
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