Off Effect to Mask Group Effects

[brett]

Hi Team.

Racking my skull over here.

I have been working on a sequence for the last few weeks in my "spare time".

I have a whole house group with some obnoxious random strobe effects on it across the sequence.

I have been working then model by model through the sequence creating the per model effects that I want to show.

Anything that I have their own effects on, I want to effectively overwrite what's in the whole house group and focus on just the effects for that model.   I discovered that if I had an "off layer" on the model, and then had everything the way I wanted, that the off layer masked the group effect and showed the model effects.

This worked great forever, no issues.  Worked through upgrades to 18.1 and 18.2.   All of a sudden, tonight things got a little wonky (slow rendering, slow switching between screens etc) so I went ahead and rebooted and relaunched everything.

Boom.  all of a sudden, none of my "off effect" masks work anymore.   The whole house effect goes through to all of the models, so whenever they aren't doing their own thing, they are showing the house effect.

Question:
(a) what could have changed (I didn't change anything.)
(b) was I just lucky that the off effect with no change to layering worked in the beginning and it never should have?
(c) could something have changed in how the layering or rendering works

Thanks in advance, if there is more detail I can provide - let me know.

Thanks,
Brett
Batavia, IL

[Gilrock]

Make sure the blend mode for the Off effect is "effect 1" otherwise you are allowing the models to cross blend.  Or you can goto the Sequence Settings dialog and turn off Allow Blending Between Models.

[brett]

Thanks Gil.  Forehead is now bruised and slightly bleeding (from all of the knocking.)   I tried both approaches, neither changed the effect, it's just like everything randomly changed.  My GUESS is that what I did never should have worked in the first place.   SO - I just deleted the random obnoxious strobes from the whole house model and will just re-add it with "copy row" to the models that I end up wanting to have that effect.

What I love about your software is the 20 ways to skin a cat when necessary, creativity is king.

Thanks for the quick response, you guys rock.

-Brett

[Gilrock]

If you turned off model blending and it still appeared to be blending then you have a render order issue.