Moho Forum

Once again I'm struggling with something pretty basic. I want to make my characters blink, and so in the group layer for my eyes, I have a vecter layer, unnafected by the masking, that covers the eyes entirely with some larger circles with horizontal lines across them to look like closed eyes. Normally these layers are invisible , I just need to make them visible for 1 or 2 frames every now and again, but when I try to do this in the timeline it doesn't seem to work. Either the closed eye layer is visible or invisible at all times. What am I doing wrong?

There are two kinds of visibility. If you click in the Layers window on the eyeballs icon, you turn a layer on or off - that affects the layer no matter what the time. It isn't animated - the eyeball icon in the Layers window is more of an organizational tool to let you simplify the scene by temporarily turning a layer off or on.

If you want a layer to turn on and off during an animation, double-click it in the Layers window to bring up the Layer Settings dialog. There, you'll see a checkbox labeled "Visible". If you change this checkbox, it records the frame you made the change at, and plays is back again when you play the animation.

As an alternative to using the Layer Settings dialog, you can click directly in the Layer Visibility channel in the timeline. This channel looks like a piece of paper with an eyeball. Clicking on this channel will add keyframes that indicate when the layer is on or off.