to me, personally, in my preferred workflow, I’ll pretend I’m on twitter: @Blender#fail.
I shouldn’t have to go through the compositor for this. Me no likey the compositor - not another toolset that I want to or have time learning right now.
I’ll use whatever tool get’s the job done in the least amount of steps.
My question has been answered. I’d hoped maybe a programmer would pipe in and say “actually, that wouldn’t be too hard of a thing to change in the code… assuming there’s enough demand for the feature”
@Felix_Kütt
Yes, probably, but again as in Materials with Nodes… I just have a hard of harsh of a time with finding out how all these nodes do their things! Damned =8o} !
imagine a forest.
Many many trees.
You want the far away trees to fade away when they are to far away.
Soooo, basically a person should either place every single tree in a new render layer or add a different material to every single tree?
That’s harsh
Sorry, i’m being a bit slow on the uptake here - my previous suggestion wont help you ‘fade’ and doesnt seem to work yet on Blender 2.5 anyway!
Fading aside for a mo, the nearest thing i could find to that Max visibility button is under Datablocks in the Outliner, where you can animate object visibility in the viewport and in the render (Restrict View and Restrict Render) They’re separate, but could probably be linked together using a driver or something. Unfortunately, its on or off - no fade - so back to the Z-trans for now, i guess :0(
I agree - im really impressed with Blender 2.5 so far, but it would be very nice to see some small improvements in this area, for greater ease of use. A slider that gave the option of linking render and viewport vis together, and allowed increments between visible and invisible, would be nice.
(Adding to the confusion for newcomers, is the visibility option in the f-curve editor - which, disappointingly, turns out to be about the visibility of the curves rather than the object - caught me out for a sec, anyway! :0D)
I think that visibility toggle is the closest, without resorting to compositing. It’s too bad it’s boolean instead of float… oh well. Max Design 2011 is in my software library now, and is my main 3D app for technical things, animation, rendering. I prefer Blender for modeling, but even the I/O of 2.56 is too broken to use yet, for me.
Guys, I don’t know if I’m missing the point of this conversation, but the best way to this in an interactive way is by using the Object color option.
Just enable Object Color in the material panel, and then go to the outliner, datablocks, go to objects, expand the object you want to make invisible, and then animate the Alpha (A) slider of the Object color option.
You can always add a driver to this slider and animate it from somewhere else. Really easy, and it allows animated fading. You have to be in glsl mode. :eyebrowlift:
Does this work then with multiple material objects? Because I have earlier done this but had to modify each material index to map to an object (empty) and add a blend texture to affect the alpha, but I would love to be able to just select and object in object mode and affect the alpha with just a key frame, no matter how many materials were combined on the object…
Look inside the Objects section of the datablocks to see where the Alpha value I’m talking about is.
I used this technique for a free software feature film we are doing in Argentina. I used it for having soft fades in a 2.5D animation.
The only issue I noticed is that it doesn’t work well with a shadeless material which has alpha, but in that case, instead of using a shadeless material, you can use “emmit” at a value of 1.
this works on simple scenes, with objects sharing only a couple of materials - then yes, you can animate the alpha. But when you’ve got hundreds of objects, with different materials, etc, it’s much easier to select all, animate visibility fade from 1 to 0 over 30 frames (or whatever). Even the “select all objects and animate” isn’t available in blender, as it only animates the active selection.
It seems to me that - assuming you want to use Blender - you’re caught between two choices:
Keep up with squeaky-wheeling in the hope that some developer may one day champion your missing feature
Go ahead and use the solution that works now (the compositor… it’s more flexible than what you’re asking for and it’s really not that hard to figure out. If you’d like, I could provide an example .blend that does what you want).
makes me think about what a terrible workflow Blender 2.5 has to animate the visibility’s objects. Blender 2.5 should be easily to animate the visibility’s objects just by clicking in the outliner icons.
Sam, Blender is capable of animating the visibility with the outliner icons, just add a driver to the icons. The thing is that that kind visibility cannot be animated with a fade.
How to make an arrow appear and vanish in Blender 2.5.
I want a green arrow to appear then vanish in a couple of seconds.
This is done by messing with the ‘Transparency’ and ‘Specular’ buttons in the material.
We will be adding keyframes and animating the settings on these buttons.
Here is the setup:
Make your arrow, or any object, and gave it a solid material. In ‘Material’ make sure ‘Transparency’ is checked or this will not work.
The arrow starts out as invisible in frames 0 through 20.
Then the arrow appears from nothing in frames 20 through 30.
The arrow is visible and solid in frames 30 through 40.
The arrow vanishes to nothing in frames 40 through 50.
We’ll start by locking in when it is going to be visible and solid.
Get to frame 30 on the timeline then go back to the Material.
1. Right click on the button ‘Alpha: 1.000’ and choose ‘insert keyframe’
2. Right click on the button ‘Specular: 1.000’ and choose ‘insert keyframe’
Get to frame 40
1. Right click on ‘Alpha: 1.000’ and choose ‘insert keyframe’
2. Right click on ‘Specular: 1.000’ and choose ‘insert keyframe’
Now we’ll make it appear from nothing at the beginning.
Get to frame 10
1. Left click on ‘Alpha: 1.000’ and slide it down to ‘0.000’
2. Right click on ‘Alpha: 0.000’ and choose ‘insert keyframe’
3. Slide ‘Specular: 1.000’ down to ‘0.000’ and choose ‘insert keyframe’
Now we’ll make it vanish at the end.
Get to frame 50
1. Left click on ‘Alpha: 1.000’ and slide it down to ‘0.000’
2. Right click on ‘Alpha: 0.000’ and choose ‘insert keyframe’
3. Slide ‘Specular: 1.000’ down to ‘0.000’ and choose ‘insert keyframe’
That’s through materials, yeah… have always been able to do that. But OP said specifically “Is it possible now to animate visibility of an object (or group of objects) at an object level, rather than material opacity?” Which other 3D apps have, but Blender does not, yet (hoping some day!).
