Docs / Panel reference / Prompt Timeline

Prompt Timeline

The floating timeline window where prompts are laid out in time and constraint pins sit on the same ruler.

The timeline has no home inside the panel: it lives in a floating window that opens by itself the first time the tool window is shown, and is re-opened from the Timeline button in the tool window's header. Closing it hides it — your prompts are not lost.

The Animatica Timeline stretched across the full width of the screen: the header carries the skeleton selector, namespace field, constraint quick-add buttons, an inline pose prompt and the Generate button, above an empty ruler numbered in frames — this scene has no prompt blocks yet.

Reading the header left to right: the skeleton selector, the namespace field with Add, the six constraint quick-add buttons, Convert Animkeys, the inline pose prompt with Pose, and the mode readout — which in 3ds Max always says Replace. The right-hand column holds Generate, Add Prompt, Save Prompts / Load Prompts and the zoom controls (+, −, Fit). The ruler below carries the prompt blocks and the constraint pins.

#Blocks

Add Prompt creates a block; double-clicking empty space creates one and opens its editor straight away.
Double-click a block to edit its text inline. Enter commits, Esc cancels.
Drag a block to move it, drag its edge to resize. Hold Shift to disable snapping, Alt to push the neighbour out of the way (or to jump past it), Ctrl while resizing an edge to scale the block's interior pins with it.
Right-click for the context menu: constraint actions, prompt actions (edit, regenerate, export, snap) and view fits.

Faint dots in the marker band mark frames where the root joint carries keys.

#Header controls

The skeleton selector and namespace field are the same controls as in Skeleton and stay in lock-step with them — change one and the other follows. Add creates a skeleton under the namespace shown. Fit re-syncs the view to the scene range and resets the zoom.

The scene range is yours — the timeline follows the scene's range and frame rate live, and Animatica never writes the scene range back.

#Saving prompts

Prompts travel inside the .max file: they are stored on the scene root in a binary-safe slot that survives save and load, and they are invisible in Max's own file-properties UI. You do not have to do anything to keep them.

Save Prompts and Load Prompts additionally write them to, and read them from, a file of their own — useful for moving a set of prompts between scenes.

#Generating from here

Generate in the header, and Ctrl+G with the mouse over the timeline, both run the same request as Generate Motion in Text to Motion: one request built from every prompt block on the ruler.