Hide several parts easily?

[MQ]

Hey there,

if possible, I need a quick and easy solution for this problem: I have a SolidWorks assembly with many parts (around 100). Lots of these parts have different materials.

What I want to do is to hide all but two of the parts in the beginning of the animation and fade them back in later, one after the other.

Do I really have to add the fade in-animation in every single material menu?

Big thanks in advance!

[theAVator]

It's all dependent on your hierarchy/groupings, and really your materials don't play a part in it - unless you have something funky going on, the animations are applied to the parts themselves. 

Biggest thing is to set up your parts or hierarchy into the groupings you want to fade out and in. For instance, you have 100 parts, the 2 you want to stay visible initially, group them together. Then you could go one of two ways, 1- create a group and put all the other parts in it, or 2 skip that part and just have all the parts listed separately.

I'm sure others will say that if you choose the first way and have your hierarchy set up perfectly, that you could fade the group as 1 animation, and then fade each part back in separately (yes, you will still have to create an animation for each part that is being faded back in). I have never gotten this to work, personally.

My view is, if you're going to have to create 98 animations regardless, do it right off the bat - you can always group the animations later to make navigating the timeline easier. I would create the group for the 2 parts staying visible, then have each remaining part its own item/"group". At the beginning of your timeline do the fade-out animation on every part you want faded. Then, select the whole list of animations in the timeline and right-click and select Mirror, which should create the fade-in animation for all of the parts at one time. Then you can move the fade-ins to wherever on the timeline you want them to happen.

It seems like a lot of work, but in my opinion gives a lot more flexibility and its sorta bulletproof.

[INNEO_MWo]

The solution is easy. Define a fade animation of the top level group from 100% to 0%. Then create a fade animation for the first part 100% to 100%. Copy that animation and paste it linked to the other parts. Done!


Hope that helps
Cheers
Marco

[MQ]

Thanks a lot, problem is solved!

I'm quite new to animations and didn't understand that it's possible to animate (fade) parts. What I thought is that only materials can fade.

[INNEO_MWo]

Thanks a lot, problem is solved!

I'm quite new to animations and didn't understand that it's possible to animate (fade) parts. What I thought is that only materials can fade.

Materials can also fade - fade in color gradient to use in several channels - and fade with numbers (similar to color 0=black 1=white and vise versa) what can be very useful in every numeric controlled channel.

Hope that helps

Cheers
Marco