Group Motion Effect vs Members Motion Effect

[Powers_Ronald]

Is there a way to have a group's motion effect in the foreground while some of its members doing something else in the background? It seems that group (say a whole house) will always be overlayed by the effects of a member of the group (say a window). 

[Jeremiah Ackermann]

I am 99% (really 100%) positive that props will always override a group. I wish there was a way to let the group override the prop, maybe as an option in the group or the motion effect itself. I have wanted this same functionality as well, where most of the time you want to work at the individual prop level but also want to do a ripple on the whole house for one particular moment.

Between groups, I believe its the group with the smallest resolution that gets render priority (or largest if I am remembering wrong). Unfortunately that doesn't always work well. An example is icicles on a roof gable. The group uses "Use Preview" to get relative position of the icicle on the gable, but that ends up creating a larger resolution than the group with all icicles stacked horizontally. So the gable gets overridden even though it has less physical pixels. Basically wanting to do some kind of wipe (like the ripple example above) on just the gables.

Perhaps could be solved by letting a user define what is considered foreground/background in relation to other props/groups when designing the preview, similar to motion effect rows. Not sure if that functionality would cover all scenarios to get the desired rendering priority.

[Powers_Ronald]

Thank you Jeremiah. I thought that would be the answer, but I had hoped it was something I hadn't tried yet. 

[Box on Rails]

It's been my experience that sometimes the color or colors of the motion effect will over ride the Group or Prop effect. The  Effects that are mostly white seem to be the dominant group effect. To test this I will use white over colors and see what is dominant. The group ME row or the Prop.  I agree that the ability to designate certain ME row effects as dominant over all others would be a great tool. 

Edited October 31, 2023 by Box on Rails

[Steven]

I have learned, after experiencing the same thing, to create a motion row tho covers each Prop in a Group (where the motion row is on the Group, not the Prop). Then I Remove the Prop from the View so I won't do any sequencing on it, and instead sequence on the ME row that I created. For some props, this will require a custom motion effect row, but it only needs to be done once per preview if you save it as the default ME rows in the Preview.

This Group is "Pixel Tree" composed of "Pixel Base" and "Pixel Star". (If you're wondering why the star has only 6 pixels, that's a story for another post.)