On/Off Animated

[Tiny Piney]

Is there any way to turn on/off geometry so the render engine process all the face for all the frames. I tried to set the visibility to 0 but that did not work. I would like the set it so I don’t have render the animation in pieces and painstakingly turn on and off the geometry for the different frames.

[chuck]

not sure what you are talking about here, but you can hide selected objects and they wont render....i think....

 

worst reply ever....

 

chuck

[Tiny Piney]

Sorry bad question I'll try again.

 

I’m running a animation in which some geometry in the background are not visible but still get processed by the render engine.

 

Is there a way for certain geometries to Off and not rendered and later in the animation to be On without having to render different section manually. This would greatly decrease the render time.

[Craig Ramsay]

You could use backburner. Save two files... one with the background detail shown and another with it hidden. Now send the file with the background stuff to render just until the background detail is out of shot, then use the second file to render the rest of the frames. Now all you have to do is stitch the files together in a video editing package

 

Hope that helps

[quizzy]

or animating the visibility track with an on/off controller...

[Tiny Piney]

Thank you quizzy that helped bunchs

[mbr]

But won't animating the visibility add so much additional time? Or will it really just go from not there to there?

 

I'd go with hiding the images, rendering to the point where you can see them, then making a new animation file, stitching them together after.

 

But I don't have that much experience with animations, in general, so I don't know if the visibility will add processing time or not.

[DelfoZ]

Originally posted by quizzy:

or animating the visibility track with an on/off controller...

can u explain ?

[xgarcia]

Straight from USER REFERENCE:

 

--------Example: To use the On/Off controller to control an object's visibility:

 

Create a cylinder, and open Track View.

 

In Track View, select the Cylinder track and click Tracks > Visibility Track > Add.

 

A Visibility and Transform track are now added.

 

Select the track named Visibility and click the Assign Controller button.

 

From the Track View toolbar > Controller menu > Assign and select On/Off in the Assign Controller dialog. Click OK.

 

If you change modes to Dope Sheet, note that the entire track region is filled by a blue bar.

 

Click the Add Keys button in Track View — Dope Sheet and add a key at frame 20.

 

The blue bar stops at frame 20.

 

Add another key at frame 60.

 

The track is now blue again following frame 60.

 

Add some additional keys in the Visibility Track. Each added key reverses the on/off blue pattern following the added key.

 

Tip: You can select two or more keys and copy them to different positions. This allows you to create even intervals for the On/Off effect.

-------------

 

You can make geometry fade in and out using curves in the Visibility track.

 

In MAX 5:

Select your object - open track view - add visiblity track. Select visibility track and manually add keys and edit their beziers to get a nice curve.

 

 

 

Here is a 2 second test animation [772 KB Quicktime MOV].

 

[ October 14, 2003, 10:44 PM: Message edited by: xgarcia ]

[Craig Ramsay]

Hmmm I wonder if max still processes the geometry with the on/off visability controller :???:

[mbr]

I was wondering that, too. If it doesn't, that's great to know, but I know when I made this:

http://www.mbrstudios.com/competitions/videos/anim_phases.html

it took forever to render!

 

Anyone know for sure?

[Craig Ramsay]

Markus I doubt it was slow to render because of your geometry... much more likely to be the amout of frames you were rendering out.

 

Craig

[abicalho]

When I had animations like this, I would just hide the objects myself manually and render sections of the animation.

 

Using Xrefs for the main building model, you could keep the surroundings in 2-4 scenes, insert the building and render that loop.

 

It's less work and easier to handle than Visibility track.

 

Another option, since your camera movement is the same, is to simply render the "circle" only once and add the building when creating the composition.

 

Alexander

[Tiny Piney]

I run a frame to test the visibility track on/off controller

 

This is what I came up with

 

11:13 all object in the scene on (Way to much)

 

6:34 the on/off controller

 

5:37 the objects manually on/off

 

Depending on how close I get to the deadline I might have to use the manually one. Although I think that on/off controller is comparable to animating the visibility spinner from 1 to 0. I would like to use the on/off controller because it is a pain in the butt to turn on and off objects.