Hide Object During Animation

I am trying to hide an object that is associated with an armature during a few frames of an action. I’ve tried just toggling hide of the object in the outliner and adding a keyframe using ‘i’, but it also hides the armature. Also, hiding the objects further down the armature chain hides everything else above it.

What I would like to do:

Frame 1 - 5: show everything, but ‘Head-Circle’
Frame 6 - 14: hide the object ‘Head-Square’
Frame 15: show everything, but ‘Head-Square’

I’ve done a lot of google searches and forum searches, but cannot figure out a solution. Might be my lack of animation experience. Don’t know. Help? :frowning:

Attachments

MeshSwap01.blend (454 KB)

Sorry, this should have been placed under the Support section and not Artwork. My bad.

Have you found the solution to the problem yet? If yes then tell me what was the solution? If no then do tell me that too so that i can consult my friend about this problem. He might can help out.

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hey mate, well u can just animate the node system ? , put a transparent node in the shader on the object, and mix it with a mix shader. put the mix to a 100% so the transparant node get 0% , and when u want the object to disapear . simply animate the slide on the mix shader so that the transparant shader gets to be 100% dominant and there u got an invisible object. cheers

Thanks for the reply rybergs. I’ll give this a try tonight after work.

Is using only one model with shape keys for a round and a square face not another kind of solution for your problem? Doesn’t work with (un)hiding objects during animations but it might provide the effect you need in a whole other way.

Thanks for the suggestion Meshmonkey. Your suggestion using shape keys might just work. Since I’m exporting to an FBX file and importing into Unity, the shape keys would go along with the export and show up as blendshapes. I’ll give it a try after work.

I tried Meshmonkey’s suggestion at lunch and it works great in blender. I’ll have to do a bit of scripting to get my workflow more streamlined for what I’m trying to achieve, but seems like a solid solution. Plus, if the FBX exporter gets updated to support shapekey and object animations, blender could be a great 2D animation tool for game developers with appropriate tools that could automate some of the work.

I used blender to create the animations for my Ludum Dare 32 game, The March of Melons. You can download the game from my submission page on the Ludum Dare site: The March of Melons


Thanks for the help!

Just did a really rudimentary test using Meshmonkey’s suggestion and it works in Unity. I’ll have to do some more testing with multiple actions to confirm that everything is working how I want it, but this is a good start. The only issue I’m having is that the curves set to constant interpolation in blender do not import correctly in Unity and shows as a bezier. You can correct this in Unity by copying the animation from the FBX file and changing the curve for the shapekey keyframes to constant. I might be doing something wrong and that is why the curves are not constant, but I’ll have to do some investigating.

Since I’m using shape keys within my animations, making multiple actions doesn’t do me much good. It seems blender 2.4 actionscontained shape key keyframes. Not sure how long ago this changed or how to make multiple actions with shape keys without adding drivers.