the from/to frames are taken from and correspond to the DS timeline range markers (the rather tiny triangles to the left and the right above the main timeline) - move them and you will see the changes in the plugin, or change the plugin settings, and you will see the markers move (if the timeline is visible of course).
means the time range is always controlled by DS or other animation plugins. from my experience the range setting is not recalled by DS or sometimes set to strange numbers (maybe this is because auf aniMate2 - i don't know).
to switch cameras (and render settings and environments) within a single animation, the cue list is the place to gogiven you have a bunch of cameras in the scene which are individually keyframed (or static):
1 place your frame marker to any frame, and click "get current camera, render setting & environment" in the anim tab. you will see, that the dropdown boxes below just switch to whatever is currently active. you can of course also select cameras, etc. by hand - the dropdown boxes always have all cameras, render settings, ... currently available listed.
2 the button below this block says "frame X: add current setup to cue" where X is always the current frame number.
note: you need to always add a cue point for frame 0 - cues can not start somewhere in the middle, thus if the cue list is still empty, the button will always read frame nbr. zero.
3 now add 1, 2, 3, ... cue points.
4 to edit a cue point, just click it in the list and you will see the 3 dropdown boxes for camera, ... update to the current cue setting (and the button below reads "...
update current cue setup". so whatever you have selected now, if you click update, you will overwrite the current setup.
5 to delete a cue point, double click it (this will also set the 3 ddboxes to the entries of this cue point, so you can re-add it, if mistakenly deleted).
6 to activate the cue settings, tick the respective checkbox left above the list
7 if you now manually scrub the time marker over the timeline, you will notice that the 3 setup ddboxes will update to the cue settings (given they are different
), and the cue list will highlight the current entry.
per default, manually scrubbing won't send changes to octane, but as soon you start animation rendering, these settings will be recalled accordingly; if you like to see the changes wile scrubbing manually, just untick the 2nd checkbox.
note: the default setting (ticked) should also change settings if you click play in DS - a bug recently introduced
currently keeps it from doing that (so only unticked + manually scrubbing, or animation rendering in general will recall cue point settings for now).
if the cue list is deactivated, an animation will always render with the settings currently active in the 3 ddboxes - theses selections are also saved to the project. plus of course the cue list itself.
so, the bottom line: if you like to only switch camera angles, you can use the cue list to get exactly that without saving different versions of the scene. in addition, the cue list is also meant to help rendering image series, where you set up stuff from frame to frame but not necessarily animated. for animations you most probably won't change render settings and/or environments (usually cameras only), but for image series it might be handy to switch them also, to have different size/aspect ratio settings, other tonemappings, etc....
