I’m struggling to be able to animate the drawing of a complex shape which I’ve turned into a mesh; specifically a treble clef as pictured.
What I’d like to happen is to animate the drawing of this, starting from the middle and finishing with the large dot at the bottom. I’ve tried to approach this a number of ways, the easiest being to use a curve instead of a mesh and keyframe the bevel factor start/end values. However, I cannot easily trace this unique shape with the bevel object used.
I’m wondering if there’s a way to do this in mesh mode, possibly by keyframing a gradient texture or colour ramp with transparency or some other way?
I’m at a loss with this one, if anyone could show me to accomplish this I’d be so grateful!
this is a typical motion graphics exercise, one you could definitely do with animation nodes addon (pretty sure there is a tutorial for your case somewhere, but I wouldn’t know how to do it personally, this is not my specialty) or with houdini of course, but if you want a simple reveal, then an animated material is fine. You could for instance unwrap the object so that the UV is continuous and vertical, and animate mapping coordinates to “fill it in” like this -> http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=46426
If the gradient is too gradual you can also move the stops closer together to make it more sudden.
Thank you so much for the advice on this and the very clear blend file! I implemented the nodal setup after unwrapping the mesh along the y-axis it worked like a charm I actually managed to get a smoother reveal by maintaining the multiply value and adjusting the add value instead, for my shape anyway.
I had actually never heard of the animation nodes add-on, so thanks also for the heads up about that. Based on some online tutorials I found, it does look like something that I’ll have to become acquainted with for my line of work…the horizon keeps shifting!
Glad to be of help, if you like nodal stuff you should also check out Houdini (there is a free version), it is hard to approach but incredibly powerful.
I actually managed to get a smoother reveal by maintaining the multiply value and adjusting the add value instead, for my shape anyway.