2023.2 Animation - How do I see a selection of channels but not ALL channels?

Please help!!!

I want to look at the one channel I’m working on plus 1 or 2 other channels from different nodes in the batch.

What I used to do is collapse every channel, then open up the one I want to work on and any other ones I want to reference.

I can’t find a way to do this now. Collapsing channels doesn’t seem to affect the visibility of the curves any more.

The only thing that seems to affect the visibility of the other curves is the setting called “Show Curves from Selected Channels”. When on it shows only the curve you’ve selected and when off it shows every single other animated curve in the entire batch.

Am I missing something really obvious?

Disable “Show Curves from Selected Channels” in the Gear menu and then click on the Screenshot 2023-04-06 at 10.26.38 AM button above to disable the Filtering (which should be set to Animated_Selected) by default.

Hi Fred. Doing that shows me every single channel with animation in the entire batch. How do I slim that down to only the channels I want to see?

You could either:

  1. Disable the Filtering, select the channels and re-enable the filtering
  2. Create a custom filter using the Set Criteria… option inside the pulldown button. In that case you could put the name of the channels separated by a comma (x,y,z) or colour code the channels and create a filter based on colours.
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Regarding option 1.

Seems like if I select some channels and then reactivate the filtering, as soon as I deselect any of them they disappear again.

They do, yes

Regarding option 2.

That is a lot of work building a filter just to compare 2 channels

This used to be quick. I could open a channel and look at it. Then close it and open another one.

Now I have to open it, change it’s colour, add the colour to a list, do the same for the one I’m using…

I think I’m going to cry

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Why does collapsing channels no longer affect their visibility? This is crazy

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The first thing I told you should restore the previous workflow and you shouldn’t see any difference. If you see one, please let me know what it is in comparison to a pre-2023 version.

Disable “Show Curves from Selected Channels” in the Gear menu and then click on the Screenshot 2023-04-06 at 10.26.38 AMbutton above to disable the Filtering (which should be set to Animated_Selected) by default.

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Sure…

With “Show Curves from Selected Channels” in the Gear menu disabled and Filtering disabled, I can still see every animated channel in my batch - despite having the entire hierarchy of channels in the animation window collapsed.

@fredwarren Did you get a chance to look into this?

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My current work around is to copy the nodes I need to see into another empty batch and view the animation channels in there.

I’ve added this as a Flame Feedback request

Hi @fredwarren I’d love a reply from you on this issue:

Collapsing animation channels does not hide them in the animation window.

I don’t have much to add. This was a change we have made so the visibility of the channels inside the hierarchy doesn’t influence the visibility of them channel.

You have submitted a Flame Feedback request to have the old behaviour back, that was the thing to do.

It would be nice if you could record a video showing in which situation it causes a problem so we can better identify the problem you are dealing with.

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Here’s the issue:

Video

It just seems very clear to me that there should be a quick way to select which curves you want to see.

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Hey @leovfx . I thought your question was interesting so I took a peek and might have found a potential solution. It’s probably a few more clicks than you are used to from previous versions but since in previous versions you were collapsing multiple channels maybe it isn’t that out of the question. It’s a little specific and involves some obscure stuff so I recorded a little video, but the long and short of it is that it involves marking the channels you want with a color, and then filtering by that color, and then carefully selecting them in a specific order to be able to scale one set of data while looking at another set. It’s taking advantage of the filtering and color system which I think are pretty cool.

Personally I’ve never done something as advanced as what you’re describing, and I find the new animation channels to be working exactly how I need them all the time, which in my use-case is a big improvement over the old system.

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