The TIME component puts out percent values that change over time allowing you to animate DarkTree shaders.

How Does It Work?

Creating a DarkTree with animated parameters is relatively simple to do. The TIME component handles an animation through its Spline Editor. The Spline Editor lets you build a Frame vs. Value graph that lets you simply and precisely set the output value for every frame in your animation. Figure F1 shows an example of a TIME spline.

The Spline Editor's vertical axis is Value.  Values are percents, running from 0.0% to 100.0%. These represent the Percent type values returned to any components linked to TIME. The horizontal axis is Time, and represents the frames of the animation.  In figure F1, the value at frame 10 is about 73% and at frame 20, it's about 50%.  The curve smoothly fills in all intermediate points to give you a smooth animation.

When you drag out a new TIME component, the default number of frames is set at 30. You can change the default by clicking on the DarkTree Editor's Properties tab, located with the component bin. Here you can set the Start Frame, End Frame and Current animation frame.

Hints!

If you want to make a time curve that fits a standard Generator curve, you can link a linear time component straight into a Generator Class component.  To do this, link the Generators "Input" to the linear TIME component. Figure F2 below shows and example of a time based  Spline curve. When a function is in the time domain, the function plot will turn blue.

Note that you can continue the time curve in a TIME component outside of the range of the DarkTree shaders animation. Although times outside of the Start Frame and End Frame range will not be rendered, you can use points outside this range to smooth the beginning and end of your function curve.

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