Animated Shape Visibility

[SimplSam]

It would be very nice & handy to have Animated Shape Visibility (On/Off) - particularly for cases where there are multiple shapes in the same layer, and you need some of them to instantly appear and disappear.

Currently one must work around this by using: Opacity, Masking, Moving, Obscuring, Shape Ordering or Seperate Layers; and each of those workarounds have limitations, consume time or can have an impact on the workflow/animation and subsequent edits.

Using Opacity is the most obvious solution, but it does not work (workflow) well with styles.

A clean and simple animated on/off (similar to layer visibility) would make life much simpler.

[Daxel]

Absolutely, I would love to have that. And to have it in a handy place like the select shape tool.

I use A. Evseeva's Select Shape script to hvae the option to turn the shapes on/off, among others. That is just an easier way of turning the transparency of the fill and the stroke to the max. value. But as you mention, I am frecuently frustrated by the fact that I can't do that to shapes that have styles, so I have to copy the properties of the style to the shape and "lock" them, losing the style functionality that I may need if I want to make the shape visible on a later point in the animation, because the "lock" is not keyframeable.

[Hoptoad]

I also would like this feature.

Once upon a time, I assumed Moho already had this feature and spent some time trying to figure-out how to make it work.
When I realized it didn't, I was like. . .huh?

I usually just use STEP interpolation and translate shapes off to the side to make them suddenly disappear.

[Greenlaw]

I usually just use STEP interpolation and translate shapes off to the side to make them suddenly disappear.

That's a good old standby trick. A variation I've used is to shrink the shape and hide it behind another shape. And before we got Vitruvian Bones, Victor came up with a clever 'rig-switch' trick that used an SBD to place a sub-rig off-screen and 'replace' it with another sub-rig from off-screen. I used it on a few shows and it worked great!

As for actually keyframing the visibility of individual shapes, yeah, the only way I know of is to keyframe the opacity in the shape's style.

@Daxel, I wasn't aware of A. Eveesa's Tweak for Select Shape script...checking it out now. Thanks for the tip!

[Daxel]

Those are nice tricks but I often need to make a shape transparent when I'm using a reference to have a drawing with some parts in front and others behind a different layer. So the reference usually have some shapes transparent to simulate the effect. I use that for clothes that are in front an behind a character's part and I prefer to have that clothe drawing in one layer to be able to animate it easily because those front/back parts can be conected and move as a whole.