Best method - mass animating the visibility of objects?

[TheImageFaculty]

I have had a quick look through the forum and it's not entirely sure what is the best way to go about this.

Q01- Is animating the General Visibility attribute the only/best way to fade in out the visibility of an object? Obviously I could animate opacity of shaders, but that would require lots of seperate shaders, I would rather do this on an object/group level.

Q02- It's not possible to animate the General Visibility via the Attribute Spread Sheet, am I right? Manually moving the slider/keying seems to be the only reliable way to change it's value right now.

Q03- When I animate the General Visibility I do no see it update in IPR, is this correct behaviour? I need to refresh the IPR viewer to see the changes it seems. I have Moveable Proxy checked as the geo type.

I need to create an animation where a number of boxes sequentially appear then fade out.

So at the moment my current approach is to take a group of objects and animate their General Visibility. I then duplicate special this group, so it come with keys intact and the offset the keys to get the effect I need.

It works, but it's pretty manual and there is a lack of feedback via the viewport/render as to what is going on. Any suggestions welcome.

Cheers,
Darren

[calus]

You are out of luck for this as Octane IPR is buggy as hell with animated attributes

Q01- Is animating the General Visibility attribute the only/best way to fade in out the visibility of an object?

This is the easier way I guess, yes.

Another way is to layout all objects UV along U, then animate one global gradient texture along U,
and plug this gradient in the Material opacity (this way you can have 1 material for all objects)
Obviously if you need the first UVset for texturing you can't use this method as secondary Octane UVset is a missing feature in the plugin
EDIT: Octane UVset now works in the Maya Plugin so this method can be used.

Q02- It's not possible to animate the General Visibility via the Attribute Spread Sheet, am I right?

Not right, you can animate this attribute trough spread sheet (shapes selection), but I would use channel box instead as you can also edit attribute for multiple shapes in it.
But you can't edit or autokey animated attributes while IPR is active because of a stupid Octane IPR bug.

Q03- When I animate the General Visibility I do no see it update in IPR, is this correct behaviour? I need to refresh the IPR viewer to see the changes it seems. I have Moveable Proxy checked as the geo type.

Well it should have worked, but this is just another bug with Octane IPR and animated attributes...
You could add a control object for General visibitlity (connect a locator translationY to this attribute for example), then at leat you would have Locator movement feedback in the viewport.

[TheImageFaculty]

Hi Pascal,
Thanks for ideas on this subject. It became something less of a problem as we decided to animate in post instead, but I can see that the ability to animate attrs and have viewport feedback is not ideal.

Thanks,
D