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A forum post by Spirit-X

Ok, I'll try to explain this clearly although I've only just started exploring Timelines and Keyframes so please bear with me.

I made a little helicopter and at the front, just under the nose, I did a cutout with a cyclinder for the landing gear. So I then scoped out to get at the new sculpt and captured it's position (still inside the chopper) in a keyframe. Next I got another keyframe and animated the cylinder coming out of the chassis (i.e to act as a landing gear).

So far great, no issues. I have a 5 second Timeline with one keyframe at each end. It plays a lovely animation of my landing gear extending out of the chassis and I'm happy. So I make another Timeline, the same length, and on this one I simply swap the position of the two keyframes, so it plays an animation of the landing gear retracting back into the chassis.

So I have a 'Gear Extending' Timeline and a 'Gear Retracting' Timeline. So far, all is good.

Now I want to do the same thing at the back of the helicopter and have two more of the cylinders, one each side of the chassis at the back acting as the rear landing gear. So I played my 'Gear Extending' Timeline, to get the front gear out, then I cloned it twice and moved the clones round to the back to put them where I want them.

Got the two rear pieces in position, all perfect. Now to my amazement, when I then hit Play on the 'Gear Retracting' Timeline, it animated all three landing gear sliding beautifully back up into the chassis. I couldn't believe my luck when I realised that cloning the original cylinder also cloned the attachment it had to the animation keyframes I had created, giving me the animation on the two rear gears for free! An awesome feature that will no doubt be very useful.

But here is the problem. After getting over the shock of not having to go through animating the rear landing gear manually, I hit Rewind Time to carry on with the project. And oh dear. When I hit rewind, I got back to 'normal time' (without the Timelines active) to find that the rear gear are sticking out the back of the chopper while the front gear is in it's 'retracted' state inside the chassis.

They are out of sync because I used the Timeline to get the front gear out before I cloned it, but that's not REALLY where it was in real space, it was just a Timeline. In real space it was still inside the chassis.

So hopefully you get the nature of the issue. Is there any way for me to re-sync the two rear pieces with the front piece without having to reposition everything by hand. Right now everything looks perfect and I want to keep it except the front gear is retracted and the two rear ones are extended.

If it makes any difference, the last keyframe of both Timelines does have 'Keep Changes' active. But it guess it only keeps the changes in Play mode, not Edit mode. Is there any way I can get it to keep changes in Edit mode or anything else I can do to sort this out?

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