What I do is I film a scene involving fading characters twice, using the old school "chroma-keying" method.

1. Shoot the scene with all relevant characters in place, but turning the character to be faded to "off". Shoot the scene and export.

2. Then, turn off any sets/solid characters/props, etc, and make the background green. Turn "on" the character that is to be faded. Reshoot the scene with the new set up and export.

3. After exporting both shots, go into video editor, and make the appropriate adjustments with chroma-keying, fades, etc, then export the composited shot. :)



"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

Also remember to set the Specular value to 0 if it's not, otherwise you may end up with some "ghost" effect.

I have created an invisible head a while ago (it's a freebie) and you can actually make the tongue invisible by setting the Opacity map to black. To fade out gradually you could use video as a texture.

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Well, you can kinda do characters. See, you have to fade out everything individually. With props, it's usually only one set of textures. With characters you have to fade out the upper, the lower, the shoes, all the skins, the hair, the eyes...all coordinated to fade at the same time. But, when you've done that you still have a tongue hovering in mid-air that has no related object to fade out. It's usually easier to just make the scene with the character visible and with it not visible, then output both scenes and fade between them in your video editor.

I haven't messed with doing that in iClone5, so you may be able to completely fade out a character now.

- Keith

Wow that's great...is that for real? You can have fades? I thought in past versions of iClone that you could only turn something On or Off, but without a gradual fade in between. Does this include characters too?!!

With the object selected you would use the opacity slider on the right-hand menu.

Since you'll want it to be 100% opacity up to a point, be sure to put a keyframe under the prop's Material section at the frame where you want it to start fading out. Just double-click that frame and it will put a keyframe there. Then advance the timeline to the point you want it be completely faded out and drag the opacity slider to 0%. You may need to check the box "Effect All Channels" to make sure all of the materials fade out together.

- Keith

I'm new to using iClone 5.
Is there a way I can make an object fade into the scene and later fade out of the scene? Kind of like a ghost. I think I can make objects appear/disappear by toggling show/unshow in the scene manager, but that's too sudden. I want to fade objects in and out.

Thanks
Mark