How to animate visibilty for mutiple objects in 3ds Max ?

Peksio

Hello, I would like to ask You how can I fast animate visiblity of multiple objects in 3ds max.

Let's say that I have 1000 objects and 200 frames. I want every object to slowly appear (let's say each object should go from 0 visibility to full in 20 frames) in these 200 frames. For example, one object should start at 50 frame and be fully visible at 70 frame while other one will start at 150 frame and be fully visible at 170 frame.

How can I speed this up so I don't have to keyframe every object by hand ?

Thanks and Cheers !

monster

If you are using a recent version of Max, 2016+EXT or 2017, you can use Animation Presets. 

http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2017/ENU/?guid=GUID-308209EF-063B-4117-975F-75B9CCD2BC25



Note: I had a long pause of about 15 seconds after applying the preset. I edited that out of the GIF to keep the file size down.

Zhalktis

If you only need to animate their visibility identically, there's a very simple solution:
By default "inherit visibility" flag is set on objects, you can simply link all objects to one object and animate the visibility of that one object. Might not work as expected when exported to a game engine, though.

An alternative is to instance the visibility track to all those objects. That way animating one object's visibility will change the visibility of all the rest. Here's a little script for that, run it when you have objects selected:

(
    with animate on (selection.visibility = selection[1].visibility)
    local visTrack = selection[1].visibility.track
    for obj in selection do obj.visibility.track = visTrack 
)