lock curve ?

[contrabazista]

hey how do you lock a curve in the graph editor so its unselectable or even better invisible?
yury
thanks

[joojaa]

Well you cant realy hide it PERMANENTLY a good operator will find it no matter what.

One way is to make the attribute hidden (in channelbox rightclick on attribute name) or non keyable, it does not realy make the attribute realy non keyable but insetead does not show it in the channelbox, and does not auito key it. Then rightclick on the outliner part of the graph editor and choose show -> attributes -> keyable.

There are lots of other filttering options too.

[failure]

Why do you want to make it invisible/locked?

[joojaa]

Id bet its because of too mu much clutter... I do it all the time!

[contrabazista]

you see I am a TD and I am making a rig for animators to you use.

for example I have cube and it can be animated moving up and down in Y . Now I set up a set driven key to change the scale of the cube depending on the translateY value. I moveit up it gets bigger I move it down it gets smaller.

Animator will do some animation and then desides its too slow . To speed it up he will go and Shift select all the Curves in the graph editor and scales them to make animation faster. Ok well in that case the set driven key will get scaled as well and it will brake things .

So is there a way to protect the curve from been selected that way?

yury
thanks

[failure]

Make a character set called: "animators, you can touch only these curves", containig all the public attribs.

[contrabazista]

hmm .. yeah that would work. but we do not use character sets here. so I am still looking for a solution .
Maybe I could change the color of this particular curve to something brite like yellow and just tell animators not to touch it. But I do not know if there is a way to change a color of a single curve in the graph editor.

yury

[failure]

I just gave you the solution. Just use the character set. It's trivial. And more bulletproof than changing the color of the curve.

[joojaa]

And why exactly do you not use character sets?? Its rather like buyinga a ferrari and only drive 5 mph with it its usefull but you dont have to use character sets in any case..

Anyway i jut told you how to hide anim curves without using character sets! why does it not suffice as a solution for you?

Anyway just use cchannel controll to drop any unvantted channels away form channelbow view so that they dont accidentaly shift select them.

[failure]

I have to disagree with charset-ferrari analogy. Character sets are pretty simple and straightforward ( if you don't use them for non linear animation ).
They are just a convenient way to "group together" a number of attributes for whatever purpose you need.

[joojaa]

Well they serve more functions than just convineient grouping, namely for auto keying. But NOT USING charset is wierd because it does:

a) NOT include any extra overhead
allmost no extra clutter
C) it only seimplifies things a bit

So theres realy nothing to loose using them, like theres not realy nothing to loose bu driving the ferrari 90 mph, its still going to be in the garage for most of the time undergoing repairs (lets face it a sports car is optimized for performance, not so much longlasting dependability. so its oviously going to need maintenance more often than a family car.) Sure you ghave asilghtly elevated chance of trouble but its outweighted by the speed at wich you reach your destinanation. Asn yes charsets dont allmost add anything in terms of problems except perhaps the need to inform your animators.