Maya’s Scene Time Warp options let you set up global time warping effects. Time warping is also sometimes referred to as speed ramping, an effect where motion appears to speed up or slow down within a camera shot.

Using these options, you can create a timewarp curve – an animation curve that lets you warp the global time in your scene. Changing the shape of this curve lets you manipulate the global timing of other animation curves in your scene.

The timewarp curve connects to the global time node, mapping global (unwarped) time values to warped time values. When you view your timewarp curve in the Graph Editor, the warped time is represented by the vertical axis, and the unwarped time by the horizontal axis.

Because the timewarp curve is a single input to the time node, you can easily modify the global timing in your scene without needing to perform tedious maintenance of many node connections.