Moving motion path in time

[joe-wright]

Hi, sorry if this is a stupid question, I'm new to Maya.

I have a motion path working fine.  What I would like to do is move the whole path in time (i.e., have it start at a different time but with all the relative timings within the path kept).

I cannot work out how to do this.  Do I have to bake the animation to keyframes and move them?  That seems a bit clunky.  I've seen much older posts talk about editing motion path parameters in the graph editor but nothing for the path appears in there for me.

Any help much appreciated, Joe 

[nowayfra]

You could simply offset the time value inside the GraphEditor with selecting all keys, then, if you want to offset the time by -20 frames, type "-=20", fro an offset of +30 frames "+=30" into the time value field, all without quotation marks off course. Maya threads this like a command and sets the result as new keyvalue. Second solution, if you want to change the value more often or even want to animate it, put a node between time and animation curve node, i think a plusMinusAverage node between time1.output and animCurveTL.input should make this more flexible. You could go further and ad a custom float attribue to your motion curve and link it with the offset attribute of the plusMinusAverage to get quicker acces to the offset value.

[joe-wright]

Thanks nowayfra.

Actually I was being very stupid.  I was selecting the path and no keys were being shown in the graph editor.  Selecting the object following the path shows all the keys.  Got it now. 

[nowayfra]

Yeah depends on where inside the dependency graph your selected node is located. The motion path curve gives information as input (the curve trail world space residence) while your animated objects receives information. There might be several connections and nodes between the animCurveTL node and your focused objects in viewport but maya shows the keyes if there are some anywhere as _input_.

[joe-wright]

Got it.  Thanks a lot.  Joe