Hide/Reveal

Discussions about animating in SOFTIMAGE©
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mc_axe
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Hide/Reveal

Post by mc_axe » 28 Apr 2016, 19:45

Just wondering if it is possible to have a keyable hide/reveal, for animation purposes, instead of doing it by hand while rendering, which is bad because u cant save what u just did..

Example:
first frames of


Normally im doing this hide/reveal with materials but in this case i would need one material for each jenga block, which is a bit messy, and even more for complex scenes. Lets say a rail road with 10000 meshes :s. Or a stop motion of a city getting build up with bricks cement blocks metal and stuff:)
---

And second question is there a way to have a general slider for the transparency of an entire model with many mats and meshes under its hierarchy?

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Mathaeus
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Re: Hide/Reveal

Post by Mathaeus » 28 Apr 2016, 21:30

You can animate visibility of object, or link it by expression to something like scale, let's say if scale is smaller than some value, visibility is zero. Or, to use ICE instances and just delete the particles. However this is Boolean, on - off, nothing in between. Same behavior as in Maya or Max, if I'm correct. Also it worth to checkout, how this works with particular renderer, especially in case of motion blur.
For small example, while ago in one early version of 3delight I had to move particles across one frame, away from camera, exactly along camera ray, behind matte plane, to avoid the motion trail to 'nowhere', when they were deleted. Not hard task for ICE, anyway.
Gradual transparency by object, this belongs to material in SI, Maya, Max and Houdini (if I'm correct....). Perhaps the most versatile method in SI is, again, ICE instance, where transparency is driven by ICE attribute.

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mc_axe
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Re: Hide/Reveal

Post by mc_axe » 28 Apr 2016, 22:59

Mathaeus wrote:You can animate visibility of object, or link it by expression to something like scale, let's say if scale is smaller than some value, visibility is zero. Or, to use ICE instances and just delete the particles. However this is Boolean, on - off, nothing in between. Same behavior as in Maya or Max, if I'm correct. Also it worth to checkout, how this works with particular renderer, especially in case of motion blur.
For small example, while ago in one early version of 3delight I had to move particles across one frame, away from camera, exactly along camera ray, behind matte plane, to avoid the motion trail to 'nowhere', when they were deleted. Not hard task for ICE, anyway.
Gradual transparency by object, this belongs to material in SI, Maya, Max and Houdini (if I'm correct....). Perhaps the most versatile method in SI is, again, ICE instance, where transparency is driven by ICE attribute.
Thanx Matheus lot of info in your post and many things to look on and improve, for start i never ever imagined that u can animate checkboxes , lol i find that one so funny :)
Expressions are also gr8 stuff, this one toggles off visibility of a cube for scale x <1

Code: Select all

cube.visibility.viewvis
cond( cube.kine.local.sclx < 1, FALSE, TRUE )
same can be done for rendering visibility and so on

great so far with boolean visibility i will take a look on gradual stuff now cheers.

NNois
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Re: Hide/Reveal

Post by NNois » 29 Apr 2016, 14:41

On some jobs I was using a usefull technique (derived from what mathaeus expose you):
1. Group all your objects to be animated
2. Create an ice tree who simply pick up all your object in the group then instance them -> You've just got a complete clone of your scene in a single point cloud.
3. now you can use delete(hide) by volume/null or whatever technique to animate the visibility

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mc_axe
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Re: Hide/Reveal

Post by mc_axe » 29 Apr 2016, 23:15

NNois wrote:On some jobs I was using a usefull technique (derived from what mathaeus expose you):
1. Group all your objects to be animated
2. Create an ice tree who simply pick up all your object in the group then instance them -> You've just got a complete clone of your scene in a single point cloud.
3. now you can use delete(hide) by volume/null or whatever technique to animate the visibility
thx nnois i did some tests but im rly bad with ICE, the best i got so far was to hide all objects in my instanced model at once with volume kill. With group i get only one ID at a time, i use this set instance geo for start, then i plug it to an emmiter with zero speed and only 1 particle. I know that this is probably a terrible way to do this.
-
So lets say i have all meshes of jenga blocks in a group or in a model. How can i control their visibility with a sphere for example.

Thx for any answers :)

NNois
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Re: Hide/Reveal

Post by NNois » 13 May 2016, 13:54

here's a screenshot i just showed anotheplace
that's an unsimulated tree of course
Attachments
ice_group_animation.jpg

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FXDude
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Re: Hide/Reveal

Post by FXDude » 13 May 2016, 18:27

Thanks for this neat method!

For others, there is also a thread about this on the XSIList, dealing with islands is already very fast, but Julian Johnson's original JJ_Islands original but simpler method was yet even faster, & Olivier Jeannel used it in making a set of nodes to do things like this ... :

POLY manipulating polygons
https://vimeo.com/147899293


... except for Poly Islands
:ymdaydream:

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mc_axe
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Re: Hide/Reveal

Post by mc_axe » 13 May 2016, 23:02

Thnx Nnois for tree and FxDude for suggesting jj islands, i also found a simmilar thread, but this is again boolean type(hide/reveal):
http://www.si-community.com/community/v ... f=9&t=4806

:-bd

ill make some tests within next days thnx all!

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