Animaton input

Hello again...
So here we are... Back... Again...

Down to business, input connection on animation nodes...
Sounds kinda interesting right? (nope probably not).. Basically not to long ago i had to time remap a series of shots and i couldnt alter the original animation, i needed a method of re-timing mutilple shots at different rates... With a bit of reading around i discovered the input attribute within animation curves, this is pretty easy to manipulate.  I just used a locator with a custom attrbute called "Time" that i could animate each shot... this was then connected into the input connection of each object (this was easier to do with a little piece of script).

Ok so thats pretty interesting right... No youre right... still boring
Next step

I was next looking into some shellac type material attributes for vray, this material needs a similar fall off to the facing ratio and ramp trick but with an exponential curve as opposed to linear. I tried a few different methods with adding curves with multiple points but the result wasnt as smooth as id like. So i started by keying the reflectivity of my shader i then opened the graph edtor and changed my curve to be 0 at frame 0 and 1 at frame 1 (this can be highed but because im in vray, 1 is fine). i then made my curve to be exponential...

This really isnt enough and probably makes no sense ("Why would i want to animate this specular"). What we need next is a samplerinfo node with will read out information about the surface of an object, so the attribute we need is the facing ratio.
Facing Ratio:
The facing ratio will sample each face of an object and return a value based on its angle to the camera. The value is between 0 and 1 this is why our keys were between 0 and 1.

So we connect the facing ratio to the input attribute of the animation curve. Escentially the value is remapping the value of the facing ratio from linar to exponential, and connecting it to the reflection.

So that pretty much covers it. Off the top of my head i cant think of any other amazing uses for these methods yet but if anything comes to me ill be sure to post it.