Blue pellets on the timeline

Bongo
1

Beginner question:

As I set up keyframes, they are marked with red pellet-shaped markers on the timeline. These red markers appear when I select “Add keyframe”, so they are predictable.

Blue pellets are also appearing – seemingly spontaneously – on a lower tier of the timeline scale. Their effect seems to be that they turn onscreen objects off – visible objects may (or many not) become invisible as the animation progresses to and sweeps past a blue pellet.

The problem of sudden disappearance of objects can be fixed by deleting the blue pellets, or by right clicking a blue pellet – going into keyframe edit mode – and checking one or two of two check boxes labelled as “Visible.”

What are the blue pellets for? Why are they being peppered along the timeline? How can I assert control over what they do? Do we have a tutorial where blue pellets are explained?

I have Rhino 6 but still work in Rhino 5 for the most part. Maybe the older version of Rhino is a possible source of a problem?

Many thanks for your insights. Michael

2

Michael,

There are 6 different kind of keyframe markers (the ‘pellets’ on the timeline) each with their own colour
• Red : Objects
• Yellow : View
• Green : Document
• Blue : Layer
• Cyan : Light
• Magenta : Render Content

The blue ones, which appeared in your model, indicate animated modifications for layers. They presumably ‘appeared’ when you made a layer invisible while Animation mode was active (the button bottom right highlighted red). Visibility is (so far) the only layer property that can be animated.

There’s a tutorial video about on the website http://bongo.rhino3d.com/video/bongo-2-how-to-animate-layer-visibility

Luc

PS I see in your Rotation-rate-problem model that you (probably in the same way) accidentally animated Color attributes of the shutters. Since this are Object Properties they fit into the red keyframe-markers.