I'm doing a project where a character changes clothes (off-camera). It's not an animation but I need the character to be wearing outfit A for the first 44 frames and then at frame 52 reappear wearing outfit B. What I've discovered so far is that deleting A at any point along the timeline is retroactive to frame 1 and the same applies to making A not visible. Since conforming clothes appear to be parented to the figure, they do not have translation dials that would allow me to send them to outer space somewhere around frame 48.

What obvious thing am I overlooking here? Must I have multiple versions of the same character in the scene wearing different outfits that get swapped out in one of these intervening non-rendered frames, or is it possible to have clothing change at a given frame?

There are two ways I think can think of.

1. Add both outfits to your character and just hide the one you don't need. So lets say you want to do outfit A first, then you hide outfit B, render the animation from frame 1 to 44. When that is done, you hide outfit A and unhide outfit B and then you render Frame 45 to XXX and then you combine the two animations in a video editor.

2. Probably the way I would prefer doing it. Is to save or duplicate your project into two separate files so one for Outfit A containing that segment. And another containing outfit B. When you are done rendering outfit A you just open project Outfit B and render that as well. That way you avoid ruining or screwing up one animation part with another.

Regardless of which way you do it, I would strongly advice that you render your animations as image files rather than videos if you ain't already. So in case something goes wrong you can simply render those frames again instead of the whole animation, it can save you a lot of time.

I don't have time to reset which outfit is visible in a given frame when I scrub to it. Multiple scene files just because an outfit is changed is impractical if other things have to change throughout the sequence. And as I said before, these are stills not an animation.

Sorry misread what you wrote, thought you were doing an animation :D

But if its not an animation and you are using conforming cloth and the change of cloth is happening off camera, why does the number of frames then matter? don't really understand that. But you could maybe just change the scale of outfit A to 0 at frame 44 that should make it so small that you can't see it and then you scale outfit B into the correct scale at frame 55.

3D-Mobster posted at 9:31AM Mon, 28 January 2019 - #4344360

But you could maybe just change the scale of outfit A to 0 at frame 44 that should make it so small that you can't see it and then you scale outfit B into the correct scale at frame 55.

Here's the answer I was looking for. There's a key icon next to the Visible checkbox which ties visibility to a keyframe. The figure wears all sets of clothing in the sequence but at frame 1 outfit B is marked not visible (with key) and outfit 1 is marked visible (with key). At frame 52, outfit A is marked not visible (again with key) and outfit B is marked visible (again with key). When the third outfit change occurs the same procedure will be followed.

Now I can have a single .pz3 for all the frames I need to render as stills. Plus, if and when I need to do stories as animations this will be just as applicable.