I’ve spent considerable time trying to have part of an animation not affected by a time loop layer (animating arms separately from a walk cycle) but haven’t been able to figure out a setup allowing me to do this. I kept wishing for a way to just make the time loop not affect a certain layer.
So, to the suggestion - A nullifying layer that completely blocks the effect of a selected layer above.
It would be particularly useful for time loops where it’s often all or nothing but can also come in handy with other layers where having an encapsule with the effect and affected layers may not always work.
The nullifying layer would block the effect for all layers below it so if you want to nullify for only a few layers you have to add a new time loop layer below these and link that to the the first time loop.
That sounds like a very interesting idea. I suppose you could even give the layer an on or off boolean field which could be animated - this would provide an easy way of breaking out of a time loop.
That sounds a little complicated.
How can you specify the selected layer above? Wouldn’t it be better to isolate the non looped part in a Paste Canvas Layer and apply the time loop only inside the legs? Remember that you can link the parameters of several Time Loop layers to make them do the same effect in different Paste Canvases.
Also you should consider to convert the Time Offset parameter of the Paste Canvas Layer to Time Loop convert type: wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Convert#Time_Loop
It gives same control than Time Loop layers, but only to the layers inside the Paste Canvas.
