Hi,
I’m creating an animation 900 frames, it starts at a carpark with 200 cars then moves away. what I want to do is switch the cars off when they’re out of view (about 100frames in) so it will speed up the render process- anyone know how this could be achieved?
I’m looking at track view at the moment for visibility tracks but will this work in turning the rendering of objects off completely?
at the moment the frames are taking 13 mins per frame- and that’s basically because of the cars, so I really need to find a way to turn them off.

Thanks
Simon

3dsmax 2010 - soon to be 2011
xp 64bit sp2, intel xeon e5420 2.5, 4 gb ram - soon to 8gb I hope

If you use a step key in the visiblity track, they should go completely non-renderable.

thanks samab I will try that- I had a little difficulty trying to get a visibility track working at all but now all sorted.
One more question, is there a way to apply a (or several) visibility tracks to a whole bunch of objects-all with the same parameters?
.. I have 200 cars to apply the same track to.. it’d be handy if it could be duplicated in some way.

EDIT: dumb question - groups of course

3dsmax 2010 - soon to be 2011
xp 64bit sp2, intel xeon e5420 2.5, 4 gb ram - soon to 8gb I hope

Select all the objects (helps if they are on their own Layer) when you set the vis keys.
Also with layers, you can set render range to end at that frame, then hide the layer, then set render range from that same frame and render the rest.

right, wouldn’t you end up with two animations or do you render as stills to stich? (I haven’t learned how to do that yet)

3dsmax 2010 - soon to be 2011
xp 64bit sp2, intel xeon e5420 2.5, 4 gb ram - soon to 8gb I hope

I always render to an image sequence, for many reasons.
You can encode to a video file after rendering from the ram player if you need to.

great, cheers for the info

3dsmax 2010 - soon to be 2011
xp 64bit sp2, intel xeon e5420 2.5, 4 gb ram - soon to 8gb I hope

Lets say you have the top floor of a building, and all the furnishings, that you want to animate the visibility. The Walls are part of one Layer, the furnishings in another Layer, and there are hundreds of objects.

Create a Box. Right-Click, go to Properties, and turn off Visible to Camera.
Select all the objects you want to animate the visibility the same way, and Link them to the Box.
Animate the visibility of the Box.

And yes, with this method you can have nested visibility by linking to other Box objects with animated visibility.

Be advised that visibility tracks only have intermediate levels of visibility when rendering with Scanline. Mental Ray will jump between 0 and 1.

Tim Wilbers [FA]

College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Visual Arts
University of Dayton
http://www.udayton.edu/
3ds Max: 7.5, 8, 9, 2008, 2009, 2010

Create a Box. Right-Click, go to Properties, and turn off Visible to Camera.
Select all the objects you want to animate the visibility the same way, and Link them to the Box.
Animate the visibility of the Box.

So the visibility propergates to linked children, never knew that.
One thing I noticed that didn’t work when I tried it. If your objects have their rendering set to By Layer, Max doesn’t let you animate the layer’s vis track, would be better if it did.