Anybody get hold of anybody who is working on or has a fix for the visibility keyframing bug? Please? - - -

:( No...not me. Clint

I have tried unsuccessfully to find out an email address for one of the QC people or engineers listed in the Carrara "about" marquis. Not so easy, since Adobe hasn't announced association yet. Anyone who has a line to a Carrara Engineer should email re: above.

The workaround that I've been using is created with shaders. With 'no light interactions when transparent' activated in the shader window I just time line a shader change to full transparency to make the object disappear. Just before the object disappears I create a keyframe at 0% trans and then another key frame at 100% within one frame duration on the time line. Then I duplicate the keyframes, slide them down the time line and reverse their order for the re-appearance. Not ideal but it works. Mark

Yes Mark, i have done that technique,too. The problem i had is that even with the shadows off the reflections are screwed up. Better for me has been to snap an object 100 units up Z using keyframes as you have. Better yet would be getting an engineer to fix the problem.

Is this optimal though, in terms of rendering? What I mean is, aren't computing cycles still being wasted on transparent geometry in the scene, where "cloaked" or "invisible" objects are not computed in and rendering calculations at all? My whole concern is built around having animations that may require a series of transitions from object to similar object; You can imagine that if I have a string of say 12 of these, and each has fairly heavy detail, if the 11 "transparent" ones are still being noticed (at least in passing) by the renderer in terms of calculation, I'm going to bog down pretty hard...this is still a problem for the "hide them off camera" method, too isn't it? Or is it? Out of sight is out of mind (calculation time)? I have not tested any of this, but I'm concerned that "transparent" is not fully equal to "cloaked" in this respect. One says "let light pass through this", and the other says "don't waste any time on this, it's not here". From a code standpoint, I would feel better if we had a method that firmly says, "don't waste time on this object". --