How’s that for a post title? 
Anyhow, I’m working on an animation of a cauldron bubbling and my idea was to animate 2 or 3 bubble cycles and then make copies of them, place them around the scene, and use time loop layers to loop the copies, each with its own slightly different loop length so things wouldn’t look too cyclical.
I animated my first bubble loop and imported it and looped it successfully, but making or importing copies gives me a problem. Let’s say the bubble cycle is 1 sec and I want some delay after each bubble before cycling again. So my first encapsulated bubble canvas has a time loop layer with:
Link Time: 0f
Local Time: 0f
Duration: 3s
This one works exactly as hoped: Bubble for one second, then two seconds of nothing, then repeat until the end of the main animation.
Now, I add a second copy of the same bubble canvas. I want it to get out of sync with the first, so I set its duration to be different:
Link Time: 0f
Local Time: 0f
Duration: 2s 18f
My thinking was that, since the second cycle is shorter, it would quickly get out of phase with the first one: One second of bubbling, then 1s 18f of nothing before the repeat. Well, that part works, but the problem is that as the main movie progresses, this cycle gets progressively clipped off. On the first loop through, I see the whole bubble animation. On the second loop, I see almost the whole animation, even less on the third, and so on until - eventually - this bubble animation stops appearing on the screen. Meanwhile, the original bubble canvas (with the 3 second loop) keeps on performing as expected.
Can anybody tell me what I’m doing wrong here? I probably don’t fully get how the time loop layer works. Incidentally, I’ve tried both duplicating the first bubble canvas and changing the duplicate’s settings and reimporting a new copy of the canvas and giving it its own settings. Both cases lead to the problem above.
Thanks for any guidance.
Matt
