I can't animate Layer changes in 2.68

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi there,

I try to do the tutorial about layer changes by Jonathan Williamson seen here:

But in 2.68a, when I hover over the Object/Relations ‘Layers’, all I get is ‘Layers property cannot be animated’. Has this been stopped in 2.68a?

2

I found that this is a known bug, as reported here:
https://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=498&aid=35020&group_id=9

along with a workaround:
"Sender: Sergey Sharybin

  • Thomas, this is also intentional. See svn rev53089. Could be solved after deosgraph is finally rewritten, but for now it’s just known limitation. You could animate visibility flag in outliner instead."

Trouble is, Blender 2.68a also will not let me hover over the visibility icon in Outliner either!

3

Is funny, I accidentally came up on a video showing how to do this 3 days ago. The tutorial was by Jonathan Williams from CG cookie. thats the best tip i can offer you. i didn’t book mark it because i didn’t think i needed it. search for all of his videos. its there if you look hard!

4

Read the first and second posts. Whatever may be in the tutorial, if you use the latest version of blender IT WILL NOT WORK, the option was removed by the developers. Animate visibility in the outliner instead

5

Hi Richard,

I tried hovering over the visibility in the outliner and pressing ‘i’ on both the ‘eye’ icon and the ‘camera’ render icon and Blender said both were not animateable. Are these the visibility parameters you mean? Also, the point of this is to prevent rendering of something you cannot see… if it rendered it but as invisible, that still might take up render time.

I have actually come up with a solution for my current needs; putting the stuff to appear and dissappear on a RENDER layer, and then keyframe the render layer on and off. The reason i am persisting with the question of animating LAYER layers membership of bojects is because I can forsee it will be useful in other ways.

6

I just tried it (2.68a on Win7 x64) and it worked for me.

Maybe we’d better back up a bit and find out which OS your on.

7

Aha! I found the problem! It was because was pressing ‘i’ over the Dupligroup content’s Outliner entry rather than the Empty that the Dupligroup was being applied to! Sorry for wasting time guys! It works fine now.

So the workaround I can do, but the original title of this thread has not been solved until the Foundation put that capability back in again! As such I will leave this as ‘unsolved’ for now.