NextGen Timeline Manual

NextGen Timeline (NGT) is an animation timeline for Studio. It is a drop-in replacement for joan6694's Timeline: it reads and writes the same scene format and answers to the same plugin identity, so your old scenes open, and plugins that talk to Timeline (HS2PE, VNGE, VideoExport, FlowControl, NodesConstraints and the rest) keep working.

What changes is the editor. On top of everything the original could keyframe, you get a real curve editor, an easing editor, a library of your own curves, spline paths, retiming, key clean-up, track locks, a motion path and onion skin in the 3D view, a smoothness checker, animation baking, audio tracks, and undo for every edit.

1. You need BepInEx 5 and the usual HS2 plugin stack (HS2API / KKAPI 1.43 or newer, ExtensibleSaveFormat).
2. Drop Timeline.dll into BepInEx/plugins. If joan6694's Timeline is installed, remove it first: NGT takes its place and ships under the same file name.
3. Start Studio. Press Ctrl+T or click the Timeline button in Studio's toolbar on the left.

Updating from 1.0 is the same: replace the dll. Scenes and settings carry over. On first run NGT copies your old Timeline settings file across if it finds one.

The button shows the NGT mark and changes colour with the scene: green while the window is open, yellow when the scene has timeline data, blinking yellow while it plays, white otherwise. Left click opens or closes the window. Right click starts playback.

Panels open on the right of the dope sheet (Settings, Theme, Keyframe groups, Onion Skin, Audio, Motion checkup, Modifiers, Markers) or on the left (Animation files, Materials, Chara Editor). Only one right-hand panel is open at a time; opening another closes the first. The keyframe inspector slides left to make room instead of hiding. Every panel has a close button in its top-right corner, and Esc closes them.

Buttons show a tooltip after a short rest (0.35 seconds by default, adjustable in Settings). The tooltip is the small chip with an accent underline.

1. Open Settings (the gear) and switch on Dock compact timeline under EDITING. It is off until you do.
2. Drag the window by its header toward the bottom of the screen. A drop zone appears where the strip will land.
3. When it reads Release to dock, let go. The window shrinks into the strip.

Dropping the window anywhere else is an ordinary move, so docking never happens unless you aim for it.

• Pull the tab up. The window grows back to its old size under your cursor and stays in your hand, so you can drop it wherever you want.
• Double-click the tab to bring it back where it was.
• Drag the tab sideways to slide the strip along the bottom instead. A drag that starts sideways never undocks, and scrubbing the ruler or the key lane never undocks either, so it can't pop open by accident.
• Turning the setting off also brings the full window back.

A track is one animated property: a bone's rotation, the camera's position, a material colour, a clothing state. The track list on the left has two halves. The top half is your scene's tracks and folders. The bottom half is the add-track list: every kind of track you can create for whatever is selected in Studio, grouped by the plugin that provides it.

The selector row at the top of the list shows the object selected in Studio, with the character's card portrait or its initials. Click it to open the scene picker: search the scene and click any character, item, camera or light to select it in Studio. The viewport, the add-track list and everything else follow.

Search syntax, the same as the original Timeline: | means OR, & or , means AND, * matches any run of characters and ? any single character. Case does not matter. Example: hand&L|finger finds names containing both "hand" and "L", or containing "finger".

While a search or filter is active, folders and sections that contain a match open automatically, and close again when you clear it (Settings, Auto-expand filtered results).

The Selected GuideObject Pos / Rot / Scl types key whichever Studio handle is selected right now: a bone, an IK target or the object itself. Select the handle in the viewport first. Tracks made this way are named GO Position (Hips), GO Rotation (Hips) and so on. FK bones only rotate, so their track is named after the bone alone.

Search or browse the character's maker values by category (Body, Face, Hair, Clothes, Acc). Drag a slider to try the value on the model. The key button's tooltip is Create a track + keyframe at the cursor, or Key the current value at the cursor when the track already exists (a small accent dot marks those). The undo arrow puts a slider back to where it was before you dragged it.

Everything you changed but did not key collects in the tray: Key all at cursor keys them in one undo step, Reset all puts them back.

Loading a character's editor properties rebuilds its clothing textures once, the same as opening Studio Chara Editor on it, so NGT asks first with a Load properties button when you switch characters.

Select several nodes (FK bones, IK targets and other handles) or several objects in the Workspace, and a banner appears above the add-track list, for example 15 nodes selected: a click keys every one. Each add-track row that would apply to all of them shows a count badge such as x15.

Click a row now and NGT makes that track for every selected node or object, keys each one at the cursor, and files them into one folder, for example Yuki Rotation (15). It is all one undo step. Click the banner to switch it to the active one only for normal single adds. The banner resets to on each session. HS2PE bone tracks are not included; they follow HS2PE's own selected bone.

Click selects one track (and, with Auto-select linked handle on, its handle in Studio). Ctrl+click adds or removes. Shift+click selects a range. Alt+click selects the track's handle in Studio without changing the track selection. Ctrl+middle-click deletes a track (or the whole selection). Clicking empty space clears the selection.

Hover the empty space between two keys of a track (the gap must be at least 48 pixels wide). Drag the left arrow toward the middle to slow the start of the move, the right arrow to slow the end. Hold Shift to set both sides at once. If the left key is part of a larger selection, every selected key gets the same easing. Each drag is one undo step.

Select two or more keys, right-click one and choose Retime (stretch / squeeze). Two bars appear just outside the selection. Drag one to scale every selected key's time around the other edge; values do not change. Shift snaps the edge. Drag as often as you like.

• Apply (Enter) keeps the new timing. Keys after the selection stay where they are.
• Apply + follow also shifts every key after the selection by the same amount, so the gap closes exactly.
• Cancel (Esc) puts every key back.

The whole session is one undo step. Clicking anywhere else in the sheet, switching tabs or hiding the window applies it.

1. Select a character. Speech is the first row under TIMELINE in the add-track list; it only appears for characters.
2. Click it. The Speech track is added with one line at the cursor that reads Type what she says.
3. Click that key on the dope sheet and type the real line in What she says. Enter or clicking away keeps it, Esc cancels.

To add more lines, right-click the Speech track: the menu starts with a SPEECH section.

• The mouth is laid over whatever face is showing, from the game or HS2PE, and it works while scrubbing a paused timeline too. It fades in and out at each line's ends, and M, B and P always close the lips.
• English only. Words it doesn't know are guessed from their spelling and listed after Guessed:. Numbers are not spoken: write them as words.
• The full set of mouth shapes needs the Zolteq Expressive head. On stock heads the vowels and closed M, B and P work, but rounding for W, OO and SH and the tongue on L and TH do not.
• Muting or soloing the Speech track silences the mouth like any other track.

• Blink keys switch off the game's random blinking for that character; between your blinks the eyes stay open. Mute the track to get random blinking back.
• A blink closes from wherever the eyes are and comes back to it, so a half-open look blinks fully shut and returns to half open.
• On the dope sheet each blink is an eye with a short bar as long as the blink. Click anywhere on the bar to select it.

• Drag it by its title strip; double-click the title to put it back in the corner.
• Time: type a new time. Refused if another key already sits there.
• Value by type: one number; On/Off for switches; minus and plus for whole numbers; X Y Z for positions; rotations as X Y Z in degrees; R G B A for colours.
• Several keys at once: select keys that hold the same kind of value (all numbers, all positions, all rotations) and the same editor appears for all of them. A field shows the number when the keys agree and mixed when they differ. Type a value and it goes into every selected key as one undo step, and only that field changes, so you can set X on nine keys without touching their Y and Z. Switches that differ read Mixed; minus and plus step each key from its own value. Time stays multiple, and audio keys stay read-only.
• Tween (when the key sits between two others): drag the knob left or right to push the key's value toward its previous or next neighbour. It springs back to the middle when you let go. Works on every selected in-between key at once.

Edits apply to every selected key on the same track, are undoable, and update the paused scene as you drag. What it shows depends on the track:

• Set a mode with the chips in the toolbar, the HANDLES row in the right-click Set interpolation grid, or Auto handles in the Shift+E menu. Each change is one undo step.
• Dragging an Auto handle turns the key Aligned. Alt+drag breaks it. Shift+drag flattens the handle.
• While you drag, a hint at the bottom of the graph says which way the handle behaves, for example Aligned: both sides turn together. Hold Alt to break them.
• Keys are Broken unless you choose otherwise, so older scenes behave exactly as before. Applying a preset or cycling with E also makes a key Broken.
• Spline keys have no handles; the spline sets their shape.
• Settings, New keyframe interpolation, Auto handles makes new keys start as Auto.

Handles. Selected keys show a handle on each side, 34 pixels long along the true slope. A handle is hidden where the segment is a spline or a Hold. On an X/Y/Z track that is not split, the three channels share one easing curve, so dragging one channel's handle reshapes its siblings too. Split the channels first (keyframe menu, Split channel easing) to shape each one alone.

Faint handles. If a channel does not change across a segment, easing cannot bend it, so its handle is drawn faint. While you drag it a hint explains, for example X does not change here. This is shaping Y and Z.

Stacked keys. When several channels have a key at the same time and value, they sit on one pixel. Move the mouse near and they fan out in an arc, X on the left, so you can pick the one you want.

Speed strip. Turn on Show speed in the curve editor (in the Motion checkup's Fixing section) to draw each track's speed along the bottom. A step in that line is a keyframe where the motion hitches.

Interpolation belongs to the segment, and the left key of a segment owns it. So one track can snap, glide and settle without being split up. If a key is a spline, the spline decides the path; otherwise a channel split decides; otherwise the shared curve does.

• Path types apply to position keys (X Y Z). SQUAD is the only tile shown for rotation keys.
• Free handles: after choosing it, press M for the motion path and drag the handles in the 3D view. Hold Alt to break a corner.
• B-spline needs at least two B-spline keys in a row to round a corner; a single one on its own relaxes to a straight line.
• C2 natural is computed over the whole track, so moving one key can reshape the entire path.
• A new key added after a spline key joins the path with the same type, tension and handles, so adding keys never breaks a spline in two.

Tension runs from 0 to 4 and has two zones. 0 to 2, Round: rounder arcs that never swing past a key. 2 to 4, Overshoot: the path swings past each key and settles, which adds anticipation and follow-through. The default is 1.0 (Settings, SPLINE); each key can override it, and Reset to global goes back to the default. TCB keys use their own -1 to 1 scale instead.

On the dope sheet, spline connectors get brighter and thicker with tension, and hovering a spline key shows its value.

New position keys can start as splines automatically: Settings, Default position spline (Off, Smooth, Catmull-Rom, Round corners, Bezier auto, Free handles, TCB). Smooth new rotation keys does the same with SQUAD for rotations.

A play range loops playback over one slice of the timeline, so you can polish a section without watching the whole thing. Outside it the ruler and sheet darken, and accent brackets mark the edges.

• Ctrl+drag on the ruler to set it. Ctrl+drag an edge to move it; hold Ctrl to light the edges up.
• The Play range tool turns it on or off, or sets it from the selected keys. Right-click the tool to clear it.
• Keyframe menu and range markers: Play only this range.

While it is on, Home and End jump to its edges, the status strip adds solo 2.0-4.5s, bakes land at its start, and VideoExport's Timeline mode respects it. It is a working aid: it is not saved and not undoable.

On a keyed GO Position, Rotation or Scale track, the track menu offers Split into X/Y/Z tracks. You get three number tracks, GO Pos X (Hips) and so on, each with a key at every original time, so each axis can be timed and curved on its own. Rotations become continuous degrees that never spin the long way round.

Merge X/Y/Z into one track on any of the axis tracks rebuilds the single track. Where the axes had different eases at a key, that key becomes linear. Spline segments become plain eased segments when you split.

Split and merge refuse (quietly, with a note in the log) when the track has modifiers, when the axis tracks already exist with keys, or when the axis tracks have mixed mute states. Remove the obstacle and try again.

Click the record button on the transport bar. While it is armed and playback is paused, anything you change is keyed at the cursor: moving a character, a bone, an IK target, an item, a light or the camera with Studio's gizmo or with G/R/S; editing a bone in BoneVisualizer; moving a slider in Studio Chara Editor. The pose that existed when you armed is not recorded, and neither is anything that moves because the timeline moved it.

The status strip shows a blinking REC pill; click it or the record button to stop. If the take left 15 or more keys, the pill turns into Clean up N recorded keys?. Click it to clean up the take, or the small x to dismiss.

With a handle selected and the pointer in the 3D view (not over NGT), press G to grab, R to rotate or S to scale, the way Blender does it. Timeline must be paused.

• X, Y or Z locks to a world axis; press it again to unlock.
• Hold Shift for precision (one fifth the speed).
• Left click or Enter confirms. Right click or Esc puts everything back.
• Press another of G, R, S to switch mode.

G/R/S moves handles the same way the gizmo does; it does not key on its own. Arm record, or press K afterwards. A whole character's root handle is never moved this way; use Studio's gizmo for that. Turn the feature off in the config file (Picker / Blender transform keys) if another plugin uses those keys.

K keys every enabled track of the selected object at the cursor in one undo step. The fast block-out loop: pose, K, move the cursor, pose, K.

Key frame all Hand FKs (All tools, CUSTOM) keys all 30 finger bones of the selected character at the cursor, turns hand FK on if it was off, and files the tracks into two folders, <Name> Left Hand FKs and <Name> Right Hand FKs. Running it again reuses the folders.

1. The columns open on what the character is playing now. Browse GROUP, CATEGORY, ANIMATION, or type in Search every animation. Click an animation to play it on the character. An accent dot marks the path to the animation that is loaded.
2. Trim it: drag the white In and Out handles on the strip; click elsewhere on the strip to scrub. Loop the range (on) previews exactly the part that will be baked.
3. Set FPS (1 to 60, default 30; lower gives fewer keys) and Loops (how many times the trimmed part repeats back to back).
4. Choose what to capture: Body and limbs (IK), Head and neck (FK), Left fingers, Right fingers. Keep Loop-close on for walks and idles so the end wraps back to the In pose; turn it off for one-shots.
5. Read the line at the bottom, Bakes 4.22s of keys onto the timeline, starting at 0.00s., and press Bake.

An ANIM Baking NN% pill shows progress and the window is locked; Esc stops it and keeps what was baked so far as one undo step. When it finishes the status strip offers Clean up N recorded keys?.

Afterwards the animation stays loaded but paused on the In pose, so bones that were not baked (spine, breasts) hold still. The character's animation tracks stay muted because the baked keys drive it now, and IK and FK are switched on for the parts you baked.

Cancel, Esc or closing the dialog puts back whatever the character was playing before you opened it.

Press M (or the Motion path tool) to draw every selected position track as a line in the 3D view, up to 8 at once. Select a GO Position track (or the camera origin) with at least two keys.

• The first path is tinted by speed, blue when slow to orange when fast, with small beads one frame apart. Bunched beads are slow, spread beads are fast, so easing is visible at a glance.
• Other paths use the track's colour, or a palette colour.
• Each keyframe is a gold ball. Click it to select that key (Ctrl adds), right-click to jump the cursor to it, drag it to move the key in 3D.
• A dot rides each path at the cursor time.
• Free handles splines show their handles as light blue diamonds. Drag to shape; Alt breaks the pair.

If the path is on but there is nothing to draw, an amber pill says why: Motion path: select a Position track to trace or Motion path: this track needs 2+ keyframes.

After a Bold fix or a row Fix, the report greys out with Out of date. The animation changed since this scan. Press Rescan. The card's safe Fix N keeps the report live.

Dials (collapsed by default):

• Sensitivity (loose, normal, picky): how eager the scan is. 0.5 is calibrated.
• Fixing: Strength (default 85%) is how far a fix goes toward perfectly continuous speed; lower keeps more of what you animated. Max change (default 12%) is the most a fix may move the motion, as a share of the track's range; a fix that would go further is undone and skipped. Spline and Tension are used when a straight path is turned into a curve. Show speed in the curve editor adds the speed strip to the Curves tab.
• Checks: untick any of the 15 to stop looking for it.

Sound plays only while the timeline plays; scrubbing is silent. It always plays at normal pitch and does not follow the Speed field. Clips on different channels overlap; a new key on the same channel cuts the previous one. Volume above 100% is applied to a normalised copy, and the panel says how much headroom the clip has.

• Scenes. Old Timeline scenes open unchanged. Scenes you make open in the original Timeline too, as long as you only use features the original had. NGT's extras (markers, groups, modifiers, audio, onion pins) are stored separately and simply ignored there. The original drops audio tracks.
• Other plugins. NGT answers to Timeline's name and identity, so HS2PE, VNGE, VideoExport, FlowControl, NodesConstraints, BoneVisualizer, ShalltyUtils and Hermes keep working. 1.1 fixed several of these that broke in 1.0.
• Undo. Timeline edits have their own history (100 steps), so undoing an animation change never rolls back something else you did in Studio. The history resets when a scene loads.