Is it possible now to animate visibility of an object (or group of objects) at an object level, rather than material opacity? In other words, so that I can fade objects in/out as needed in a process animation, to reduce clutter? It would be nice to have this control without creating a bunch of extra opacity animated materials.
Set the groups of objects on different render layers, and then animate their visibility in the compositor.
no you can’t fade them in or out, they are either visable or not
Oh my god, i hope this is not the only way to do that. anyone knows a simpler way?
Animating the Z trans value would affect various materials differently, therefore for uniform fade out I too would suggest compositing for this. and mixing layers is way better (accessible together) than splitting up your assets into scenes.
Guys some time ago I was given this tip by a friend! It is possible to do it in 2.49, so I think it should be possible in 2.5 also.
You just have to animate the ColA IPO curve and then set OBcolor on for the material. If you are using textures, you should also set the object color to white in the object panel.
Here is an example blend file:
You could try rendering each object in a different pass. Then, load all the passes in Sequencer, and fade them in and out with alpha-overs. This would be easy to tweak, too.
Heh, you can even move object out of the frame!
Those are nice workarounds, or similar solutions, or using a material solution, which I specified I didn’t want. Still far from simple and convenient when dealing with lots of different things, particularly when materials are shared between fading and non fading objects (for example - I want to fade out some steel structures, but not all steel. Now I’d have to create a duplicate steel material for visibility purposes). It would be really nice if this existed - even nicer for objects which have more than one matID.
I’m bringing this idea over from 3ds max - where each object/group not only has a renderable toggle, but also a visibility value, from 0 to 1 (float).
It can be done using render layers, overlapping frame renders with transition in VSE, but those are extra steps in the workflow, and really are a pain. Especially when I don’t use the compositor, ever, but use this feature quite a bit with Max.
I’m not a “make blender like Max” person by any means, on average I really prefer Blender. but Max has a few nice features, like this one.
In 2.5 you can directly animate the “visibility” checkbox of an object. Quite simple, but doesn’t allow for fading (it’s either on or off, no inbetween).
To fade an object you need to use a material.
I did something like this, but I used a blend texture with a hard edge in the middle of the ramp, and set it to affect alpha. I set it to map to an object, and used an empty to control where it was affected. I then only had to key the location of the empty. Depending on the application, this might work, depending on the proximity of the othere object sharing the same material.
Here’s an example clip (short) from a current project showing why a material fade just really isn’t an efficient option.
(watch in 480p)
The render 30 frame overlap, with objects on, then with objects off, and use a cross fade type transition is the closest alternative… it just messes up fluidity of hitting render and letting it go; especially with blender’s lack of (an easy/simple/builtin) render queue manager (yeah, there’s command line shell scripts/batch files, etc… and other render managers, which I haven’t tried, simply due to the fact that it’s more to configure and potentially go wrong.)
is right,I used to use that a lot in 3dsmax, handy if you need to fade lots of objects at different times…
I was wondering if there was no way to apply an Alpha ramp by having a sort of object’s “overall material” that could be affected. That would be possible if textures could be “parented” somehow… But i have absolutely no code notions and, therefore this idea might be just pure SF…
almux could you do this with Material Nodes? Group all the material effects together then link to a master effect?
Well 3pointEdit, the point is i’m too dummy to have catched the way of using Nodes in Blender! I could i Pixels 3D and in Maya… But somehow: i can’t understand how to use it in Blender!
I’ll have to find some good tutorial about these for 2.5, and… a good buntch of time to look at it without getting haedache! ;/
Well 3pointEdit, the point is i’m too dummy to have catched the way of using Nodes in Blender! I could i Pixels 3D and in Maya… But somehow: i can’t understand how to use it in Blender!
I’ll have to find some good tutorial about these for 2.5, and… a good buntch of time to look at it without getting haedache! ;/
And what is this? :
Yes, of course. But imagin i wanted a character appearing progressively frome the ground with a fade effect till reaching the hair top. How would this to be managed?
This would be the perfect kind of job for compositing,
its included in the package for a reason, you know… 