Handling Visiblity toggle in animations for clothes

PotatoHead

I'm trying to make a series of images, a comic if you may, and between 2 frames, I need a piece of clothing to disappear. I've been working on this for a few days. I've hit a wall now, I can't think of anything that is practical.

- The visibility flag is not keyframed.
- Surface Ambient opacity strength isn't keyframed either.
- Visibile in render seems iffy, and adds disparity and confusion to the viewport.
- Can't scale down a piece of clothing.
- Can't transform it under the ground plane, since it's fit to the figure.
- Doing canAnimate on the visiblity property works for the session, but isn't saved in the scene, so reloading the scene requires re-running the script and adjusting all the items again.

Anyone got ideas ?

I'dd love to see visiblity keyframed in the next 4.8 beta or 5.0.

Ruphuss

have a look at this

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/matanim

be sure to have the clothing not "fit to" while running the script
it will work

PotatoHead

ruphuss said:

have a look at this

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/matanim

be sure to have the clothing not "fit to" while running the script
it will work

So it lets me "animate" the opacity of a texture ?

What happens if "Fit to" is enabled for this script ?

Ruphuss

for me it does not work then
unfit the garment
run the script
select the surface in the script
animate the opacity in the timeline
then fit it again and the animation should work

PotatoHead

ruphuss said:

for me it does not work then
unfit the garment
run the script
select the surface in the script
animate the opacity in the timeline
then fit it again and the animation should work

Looks like this has the same issue as the script I wrote that uses canAnimate.

The "canAnimate" flag is not saved in the scene file, so if you save, close DAZ Studio, then reload, it's not animated anymore.

Ruphuss

now look here

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts4/mcjanimatsave

spacecat56

I was googling yet again hoping for a working solution for this problem, and found your thread...

PotatoHead said:

...
- Can't scale down a piece of clothing.
...

Actually, you "can" do that, if you fuss with it a bit.

You have to select Show Hidden Properties in the little menu for the parameters panel. Then, when you select the piece of clothing you will see the scale values for it. In 4.7 it does not work to change the "master" scale slider, you need to set each of the sub-value (x, y, z) down to zero. "Of course", when you do that it goes to zero size / disappears in the current frame, but is animated into trash in the prior frame. You need a keyframe on the scale in the prior frame, which is difficult to set (e.g., keymate does not show it for scale of fit-to item) you just have to step back and and forth frame by frame and force the slider back to 100 (or whatever they are supposed to be for your fit; be sure to look and write it down before you make the change) in frames before the disappear, and to 0 after, until the animation engine is satisfied and stops interpolating it.

In 4.8.0.9, it "works" to use the "master" scale slider, but in many frames where I had this effect it makes trash out of other unrelated nodes in the scene. Ugh.

...
I'dd love to see visiblity keyframed in the next 4.8 beta or 5.0.

Me too! This has to be one of the most-often-sought features that has been ignored by the DS developers. PLEASE ANIMATE VISIBLE!

spacecat56

PotatoHead said:

...
- Visibile in render seems iffy, and adds disparity and confusion to the viewport.
...

On further (re)testing, I see that Visible in Render does animate and does have the intended effect on a render, I guess I either missed that or dismissed it.

There is a trick to making it work. Start at the frame before where you want the node to disappear, and toggle the Visible in Render setting off and back on. That sets a key on the prior frame to keep the thing visible up to that point. Then frame forward and turn it off.

Still, it is very unintuitive. And if you want to use it to swap out items (e.g. change hats, or have an item that briefly glows, or such) the scene will be incomprehensible in the viewport.

I just wrote myself a little plugin called AniVis that adds an item to the Edit menu to let you add a new persistent animated boolean property to any node, and then checks the current values of those properties whenever the current frame changes; it changes the value of (non-animated) Visible based on the value of AnimateVisible in the current frame; like Visible in Render it toggles things on and off frame-by-frame, but unlike the builtin property it lets me see what is happening in the viewport while I'm working on the scene..

If there's enough interest I guess I could find some way to make it available.