how to handle disappearing vector shapes?

[egendron]

no this isn't about a glitch. Im afraid its a newbie Question.

im feeling my way through AS and am at a crossroads. id like to know how to handle shapes that *should* disappear (shapes that appear *during* the animation would be easier perhaps?)
By that, I mean if you have an animation of a guy turning his head 180 degrees, each eye will either appear and/or disappear when the head turns a certain amount. what happens to the vector shapes (eyes) when they disappear?
in order to turn off visibility, you have to turn off the entire layer, not just one shape.....
so, how does one handle this?
thank you
-edg

[toonertime]

one way to go at that is with
switch layers. they are in the manual.

[Víctor Paredes]

to make a shape dissapear, you must to select and paint it (and its border) totally transparent.

remember you first must to add a keyframe just before this new one, if you want to make that the shape suddenly dissapear.

but i think that switch layer are better sometimes. and layer visibility works better too, just separate your character in several layers (remember you can reorder the layers in time too, something you can't between shapes).

[chucky]

You may have accidentally turned visibility in the time line.
Have a look in that channel , there might be evidence there next to the eye icon, look for the green line that indicates visibility on, and remove the offending off key.

[egendron]

ok
so i suppose I went wrong early on.
When *drawing/designing* the model to be animated, I should have separated shapes of the face into *separate* vector layers as opposed to just one? wow, I bet this makes for a whole lotta layers. of course, to be efficient, I suppose that they would all have to be inside a "face group folder" to move coherently?

OR

I could indeed try just animating the color (thank you for the reminder of the keyframe) to totally transparent alpha?
regarding this, Selgin mentioned that switch layers are better. Im curious, does this method (animating the color/alpha) not always work properly? occasional glitch or something?

Im familiar with switch layers, and I can do that properly but had just avoided it in the past bc it seems rather cumbersome in a vector drawn animation.

thanks again!!
-edg

[synthsin75]

It all depends on how often you expect to be changing the visibility, and how you like to work. Most people seems to separate everything into different layers. With the layer sorting, you only have to grab the layer and move it 'behind' another (like an eye moving behind the head).

With everything on the same layer, modifying the shape's alpha value is a good idea, but probably better in a reusable action.

For this kind of thing, switch layers would probably be my last choice.

[egendron]

ok, that seems to make sense.

trying to take all of this in so please correct me if im wrong about this next statement.

vector layers are much less memory heavy than image layers (PNGs) so creating a lot of those in this manner would not slow the computer down much.

yes?

-edg

[synthsin75]

Correct. Vector layers are much much easier on memory and performance.

[egendron]

Quote"With the layer sorting, you only have to grab the layer and move it 'behind' another (like an eye moving behind the head). "

trying layer sorting now. am having trouble selecting the layer to bring it back to the top once it has been "hidden" behind another layer.
is this normal?

-edg

[synthsin75]

Layer sorting only works within a group or bone layer. It is these parent layers which have the layer sort animation channel in the timeline.

Though it sounds like you may be talking about 'shape' sorting. If so, check out the help tutorials.

[egendron]

will do, thanks
-edg

[heyvern]

Keep something else in mind. How often do you really need a head to turn so far that the eyes disappear? I've found you can get away with just a "partial" turn for 99% of the time. When you need that complete turn then you can address the layering of shapes "that disappear".

The biggest headache for me was the ears. I use multiple layers.

Some of us have been trying to deal with the concept of "3D turns" in AS for a while. Genete wrote a wicked cool script for doing shape ordering in ONE vector layer using bones.

One trick that is fun to try is a switch layer with two "identical" layers. The only difference is that one (or more) of those layers has the shapes reordered. The vectors are identical but the order is changed. So you can turn the head using bones and switch the layer to hide shapes. I only use this for hands/fingers, never tried with a head.

-vern

[egendron]

thats damn clever. how did you use for fingers? wait, i think i can guess... for a 90 degree turn of the wrist perhaps?
-edg
ps im still kinda in the dark about genete's method though...