Decals: Can I toggle them on and off?

[TommyDAQ2]

Description says it all... Just not sure how to do it. How can I have a decal turned off on one frame, then turned on on the next - or even just turn it off once it's been applied without deleting it?

 

Thanks

 

tommy

[robcat2075]

In the choreography, turn on Show More Than Drivers

 

that will expose the properties for the decal and you can animate the Percentage property to 100% or 0% for showing or hiding it.

[markw]

Hi TommyDAQ2

First make sure you have 'Show Decals' turned On. The shortcut key for toggling this ON/OFF on Macs is cmdD.

To animate their visibility in a Choriography you will need to go to; Tools > Options > Global.

And checkmark; 'Show advanced properties' and for good measure 'Show property triangle'

 

Now in the Chor you are working with and you will be able to set keys for a decals visibility.

[TommyDAQ2]

In the choreography, turn on Show More Than Drivers

 

that will expose the properties for the decal and you can animate the Percentage property to 100% or 0% for showing or hiding it.

 

Thanks Rob! Tedius, but it will work.

[TommyDAQ2]

Hi TommyDAQ2

First make sure you have 'Show Decals' turned On. The shortcut key for toggling this ON/OFF on Macs is cmdD.

To animate their visibility in a Choriography you will need to go to; Tools > Options > Global.

And checkmark; 'Show advanced properties' and for good measure 'Show property triangle'

 

Now in the Chor you are working with and you will be able to set keys for a decals visibility.

 

 

Thanks Mark. Seems to be a more detailed explanation of what Robcat said. Works,but as I said, it's a bit tedious. I"ve got a highway with a different label on each brick and they have to come on at different times. Drilling down to that property to turn on or off each one - though possible - will take a bit of time. I may, for more flexibility, use that same process but set up an action, so that I can just have sliders or switches available to me to toggle each as needed.

 

Thanks again guys!

[robcat2075]

I may, for more flexibility, use that same process but set up an action, so that I can just have sliders or switches available to me to toggle each as needed.

 

An ON/OFF Pose in the model would be the way to do that.

[Rodney]

I haven't spent a lot of time trying to turn off/on decals but there are several approaches and several shortcuts you can take depending on the complexity and setup of your project.

 

Thought 1

Use a filter to show all decals in one tab of the Project Workspace.

We can filter for Types and words so that specific criteria for what we want to view on the active tab is shown.

For instance we can name a decal or shortcut a specific name intentionally so that the filter will grab them or place them in a folder that can further differentiate location and status (i.e. adding 'Decal On' or 'Decal Off' to the actual name.

 

Thought 2

Sequential Decals with Transparent frames

(A bit more esoteric but could work very well in some cases)

Let's say we know that a particular decal needs to 'disappear' for 20 frames out of a 300 frame sequence or fade in/fade out and we don't want to manually set hundreds or thousands of shortcuts to the same image sequence that is repeated over and over again on multiple models.

One solution might be to replace those 20 frames with transparent images (i.e remove the image and leave only the Alpha Channel).

 

It helps in the case of this second one if you know exactly how many frames a sequence is and then replace the files in the sequence accordingly.

Care should be taken to make sure the file resolution/size remains constant because any change can (and likely will) interupt the playback of the sequence.

 

 

Depending on the specific project there may be better ways (such as the Pose controller Robert mentions)

You could setup up a controller for instance that turns some, many or all decals off (or all of the previous) at different percentages of a Pose slider.

 

Edit: It occurs to me that you could have one decal applied to all bricks and then have that present itself sequentially.

In Photoshop you'd basically have the master layer show what will commonly be seen and then as each brick changes export/save that new image out into a sequential series of images to play out in the animation.

 

These are more 'hacking' methodologies than straightforward toggle on/off but anything that works and works well might be worth investigating.