[Bf-vfx] Alpha animation in viewport

[Guillermo Espertino (Gez)]

Hi: I've been discussing some techniques with fellow motiongraphers and 
we all agree that one of the most annoying limitations in Blender is the 
inhability to preview animated alpha values in the viewport.
In motion graphics animating the transparency of objects is a very 
frequent practice (fading titles in and out, for instance) and the lack 
of a visual feedback in the viewport to see the duration of those fades 
is really a pain, because you have to render the sequence to see if the 
animation worked as you expected. It makes the creation process much 
slower, because you can't get a quick preview using ALT+A, and it adds 
some extra steps because you have to "hide" things that have 0 opacity 
in Render but they're still visible in the viewport.

I remember having discussed this some time ago (2.4x era) and iirc it 
wasnt' something easy to solve, but I wonder if that's still true with 
the changes introduced in 2.6x versions.

Mango, as far as I could see, has some motion graphics (lasers and 
holographic screens floating around). I guess some elements will have to 
fade in and out in some point and that's probably a nice excuse to check 
this issue ;-)

Should I file a bug report about this issue or this is already in some 
TODO list? I browsed the tracker and I couldn't find a similar report, 
so I wanted to check here first.

Kind regards,
Gez.