In linear content workflows, it is expected that changing a parent actor’s visibility will propagate to its children.
While this works in the editor when disabling visibility in the outliner, we noticed that when visibility is animated via a track in the Level Sequence, only the bound actor is affected and its children remain visible. That is a different behavior than what we get with transforms, which properly propagated to the child.
Are there any plans or recommendations from Epic regarding this behavior? We are considering implementing a sequencer delegate or a new track type for visibility, but would like to know your plans before proceeding, because it doesn’t feel correct to have to add a delegate for this behavior.
Hey Manuel - there is a distinction in the engine between editor visibility and visibility in game. Sequencer animates visibility in a way that tries to mimic what happens at runtime if you were to call SetHiddenInGame so that the results are consistent between the editor and the game.
You could work around this by animating all the visibilities of the children in Sequencer as well, or by making a change to the visibility track that makes it recursive. Be warned though that changing the visibility of children would still need to track the pre-animated values of all those children as well, such that they can be restored correctly when saving the level or closing Sequencer down.
Animating all the visibilities of the children in the sequences is not really a viable option for us because it complexify to much the life of artist. Most artists still expect the “standard” behavior they get in other DCCs.
Is there any change that Epic would consider having a inherit visibility from parent attribute to be added by default on Actors? This could be off by default and be configured by project. This would be of immense value for linear content production.
For now we will look on implementing a custom solution on our side.