United3dArtists

Hi fellows,

long time since my last thing done in tS....

Question: is there a way to change the opacity of a grouped object? In other words i have a complex group of different objects and i want to change the opacity of this group in a animation.

Maybe i'm to long out but i have no idea how i could do this.

thanks in advice

No, this is not possible.
This situation is very common and I am surprised I haven't find it in other big names of 3D edition softwares neither.

The workaround is to animate the transparency for each object, one by one.

I remember I discussed this feature as a plugin some years ago. Maybe with Johny. Here was the interface : The idea was to develop a plugin that will grab the settings from the Material Editor and store only the color, the transparency, the bump or the reflectance, depending on the ones checked.
A clic on the apply button would cycle through all selected objects, and for each, pick up the existing materials, replace the shaders checked in the plugin and paint over.

I don't know about you, but you can override any attribute and export that attribute to the root of the node in WS, then you can use a common float control and animate that attribute of all the exported nodes, my AO light rig works like that. But then that'd be for the viewport render only.... other than Radiosity and Volumetrics and rendered DOF right up, I find the DirectX 9 viewport the same as Lightworks of the MS - just realtime - depending on your graphics card.