Designing on frame zero

[Nicohk92]

I've never totally come to term with the usage of frame 0 so perhaps you can help.

When I start working on a scene, I first do the general design, drawing my background, characters and positioning everything together to see what works best in terms of composition.

I do that on frame 0 of course cause I don't want to create keyframes etc.. However there's some things you just can't position on frame 0. A simple example is quad mesh (let's not even get into rigs). I have to set up my mesh to layer on frame 0 but the actual deformed look I want throughout the scene can only be obtained after frame 0, even if I don't need it animated at all.

Right now, the only solution I found is to make my deformation somewhere in the timeline, export that as a png to import it back, which seems a bit absurd.



So in short, how can I design on frame 0 if several functionalities cannot show their effect on frame 0?

[slowtiger]

If I had a deformed asset, I would create it in that way in frame 0, except in cases where the deformation processs is part of animation. Re-importing a PNG is good practice.

I do my rigging in 0 and test in following frames, jumping back and forth — how else would one do it?

[Nicohk92]

In case of mesh layer, it can only be deformed after frame 0.

I do my rigging in 0 and test in following frames, jumping back and forth — how else would one do it?

I'm talking about design in general. I have to create and draw on frame 0, which unfortunately cannot show me the final composition since some things can only be seen in their desired state on frame 1.

Going back and forth is not convenient when working on composition, framing, overall look.