Moho Animation Forum

I'm just starting with anime studio, I am learing about animation, but I've got a question. I've got star objects on a layer, a moon object on another layer, and a planet object on another layer.

I can move the moon around the planet by placing it in different locations at certain keyframes (not very round movement though another way possible?), and I have stars going across.

My question is, i want the stars to start fading away when it's half way across the screen, and to disappear completely a short time after. I want stars to continuously travel across the screen and disappear like that. So, what i've done is made 10 stars, I get them moving across the screen, but I want to recycle the stars and put them back at their starting position and let their movement/disappearance recycle, thus stars always come and go. What's the best way to go about this?

Thanks!

Cycle them.
You need to choose each timeline you used for the stars, I assume it's one layer translation timeline and one opacity timeline? Copy the first key of each timeline to the last position of your first cycle. Set this keyframe to "cycle" and insert the number of frames you want to have as the duration of the cycle.

Example

looks like opacity is handled for the entire layer, not just an object in a layer... does that mean each star has to have it's own layer?

Of course! - I am so used to put all things on their own layers that I assume the same from others ...

But you can save some work. Instead of creating new layers and creating keys on each timeline, just duplicate the existing layer with many stars after you inserted the keys for movement and opacity. Duplicate as often as you want, then go into each layer, erase all but one star, and adjust the key positions and the cycle lengths.

how about using particles?
Then you could have a never ending amount of stars all twinkling and moving.

IMO one should first learn to do things by hand. Later one could use the aquired experience in particles.

Yeah but some of us like to run cycle, before we learn how to walk cycle.