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Playable Directors are disabled?

Discussion in 'Timeline' started by ehanceMuse, Nov 22, 2019.

  1. ehanceMuse

    ehanceMuse

    Joined:
    Oct 10, 2019
    Posts:
    10
    Hi all,

    I have a scene with multiple Timelines.

    I was having some strange behavior in one and then several my Timelines (almost looked like Unity wasn't refreshing to Timeline I was on...) when I close and reload Unity now all my timelines (except the very first Timeline) have a caution triangle along the top of the timeline UIs that say "PlayableDirector is disabled".

    What are the likely culprits/how do I work around this?

    Eric Hance
    MuseVFX
     
    ehanceMuse, Nov 22, 2019
    #1

  2. ehanceMuse

    ehanceMuse

    Joined:
    Oct 10, 2019
    Posts:
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    We found a temporary workaround. If we change the PlayableDirector to 'none' and then enable/disable the game object the timeline is on, then choose the same PlayableDirector as before, now its no longer disabled and seems to work as expected.

    Unexpected behavior, hopefully it helps someone with a similar issue.

    -Eric    ​
     
    ehanceMuse, Nov 22, 2019
    #2

  3. gekidoslayer

    gekidoslayer

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Sep 27, 2016
    Posts:
    134
    are these timelines linked together via a control track? How do they interact with each other normally?
     
    gekidoslayer, Nov 22, 2019
    #3

  4. ehanceMuse

    ehanceMuse

    Joined:
    Oct 10, 2019
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    Hi Mike, good question, they aren't linked together in any way. My typical usage is to have a list of timelines for recording animation. I was enabling/disabling each one by hand to allow recording of specific footage.

    Does that help at all?

    -Eric
     
    ehanceMuse, Nov 22, 2019
    #4

  5. ehanceMuse

    ehanceMuse

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    Oct 10, 2019
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    To clarify, the only thing the timelines share are common FBX files that are meshes, which are dropped in as 'animation tracks' and then new 'animation clips' are added to that common mesh for each shot.

    -Eric
     
    ehanceMuse, Nov 22, 2019
    #5

  6. ehanceMuse

    ehanceMuse

    Joined:
    Oct 10, 2019
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    I was able to recreate the behavior where my timelines get disabled just now by saving with a new scene name, is this an expected behavior?

    -Eric
     
    ehanceMuse, Nov 22, 2019
    #6

  7. seant_unity

    seant_unity

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Aug 25, 2015
    Posts:
    1,516
    Kind of a silly question, but are the directors actually disabled when you get that warning? Either the gameObject or a parent is inactive, or the playable director itself is disabled?

    Is it possible the animation or an activation track is disabling it in some way?
     
    seant_unity, Nov 23, 2019
    #7

  8. Anthroventure

    Anthroventure

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2013
    Posts:
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    I've just had this behaviour but from a different cause. It turned out I had accidentally added a second activation track for the object the playable director was attached to. The second activation track overwrote the behaviour of the first. I didn't pick up on it for a while because this particular timeline has more than 80 objects in it.
     
    Anthroventure, Oct 30, 2022
    #8