Is it possible to pause a cycle by, say, holding the trigger key?

[liambrazier]

As the title says. I have a series of images as a cycle layer, which are triggered and play as expected when the relevant key is pressed. However, I would like to pause the cycle midway (for example) by perhaps holding the trigger down, then have the remaining play when the key is released. Is this possible?

[KJerryK]

Yes, this is possible, but not by holding the trigger down. After assigning the cycle behavior to a group, pick the layer you want to pause on and assign the "Cycle pause" tag to that layer. Then the the first time you hit the trigger the cycle will pause there until the next time you hit the trigger. You can choose several layers to pause on if you like.

Another way to do it would be to add a trigger to the layer you want to pause.

[liambrazier]

Thanks for that. Unfortunately doesn't aid me in what I'm hoping to achieve though.

It's essentially an extending leg. The cycle layers go from the standard relaxed position to straight through more animation to return back to the relaxed.

The leg will be triggered quite frequently (dancing), and actually be tied to midi inputs and things so I can't reuse the same trigger to pause/unpause. Is there instead a way to unpause/complete the cycle by releasing the trigger?

As said, the most intuitive way would be to have a key play the cycle, but pause at the extended frame if the key is still down.

[KJerryK]

I added another sentence, probably while you were responding.

If you want always to pause on the same layer of the cycle, then you can add a new trigger key to that layer, and it will pause while the key is held down.

If you want to pause on arbitrary layers, I don't see a way to do that.

[oksamurai]

Given your setup with the MIDI stuff I don't think there's a clean way to do this. There might be a hacky way somehow (two identical legs but controlled with 2 different keys so you can swap between them at certain times), but I feel like I'd have to trial and error that for a while to figure it out. I personally haven't done too much with pause layers yet.

A more formal description of the pause layers in in the Beta CC launch notes, if it helps at all: New features summary for the November 2016 release of Adobe Character Animator CC (Beta)

[liambrazier]

Thanks for that. I guess what I'm asking for (at least perhaps a more viable solution) is for Ch to allow key release as a trigger. I.E. pressing L triggers the leg layer to cycle to the extended position, and it stay there (this is currently totally possible using the current cycle layers settings), then when the Trigger L is released to play a different cycle group of the leg returning to start position(?)

Originally we had the extending and returning as identical - the cycle layers set to hold on last (extended) frame then reverse. This worked fine but unfortunately it was decided we need the 'return' sequence to be longer than the 'extending' one, hence this current headache!