Animate 100s of Objects Visibilitys in order

[MCHammond]

Hi Thanks for reading

Basicaly i have a scene with about 700 scafolding poles that are placed around a building, and my task is to animate them being installed. The client origanaly wanted them to drop in form the sky and build up from the bottom but now whats them to “Fade In” in the order that they will be installed

I cant seem to find an aproprait way of doing this:

Animating the Alpha IPo would mean hundereads of versions of each texture “3 textures per scafolding pole”.

I cant use the visiable layer trick as the client wants it to “Fade In”.

And to do it in the sequence editor would be a nightmare with over 700 layers

Is there a way to animate an object based IPO to controle visabilty, Or a “Dissolve” feture like in lightwave.?

Any help on this would be great as its due for this time next week and i have a full time job aswell

Oh the life of a CG artist LOL, im of to buy a kabab for the secound night running as i have not had time to go shopping.

[Atom]

Have you consided using the build modifier?

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Build

[MCHammond]

Thanks for the reply

That is not something i have seen before looks cool! and would work, but sadly the client wants it to “fade in” i was provided with links to you tube videos of fading engine animations that they want

The solution i am working on at the moment is to have two render layers layer1 and layer2 and use the layer animation trick to move from one layer to the other, only i will have the poles appear 15 frames earlier on one layer than the other, so that there is a 15 frame offset in the layer IPo in render layer 2 but other than that it is identical to layer 1, I will then take the two rendered sequences into the sequence editor.

Layer 1 will be constantly visable but layer two will fade in ontop for 15 frames and then instantly fade out and repeat untill all the poles are visable!

hopefully i can get this to work and i will report on my progress for future refrence!

If anyone has a better idea please share

[Atom]

I would simply do it through a frame change event.

This would require you to name the objects in a specific way.

Here is an example scene with a scriptlink attached to the camera.
On rewind it sets the alpha to 0.
As the script plays it fades in the material assigned to the object over time, controlled by a delay variable.

Give it a try…

Attachments

delay_visibility.blend (213 KB)

[blenditall]

Interesting problem.

The actual fading is not the problem… its just the number of things that have to be faded. So what if you grouped them? For example, let’s say there’s scaffolding placed at ground level first. You could join all those parts into a single object (or even two or three) and fade that in. Then you could do the scaffolding above that, etc.

[MCHammond]

OK Thanks Guys Lots of things to Try

Atom:
I Tried that .Blend and its very impresive, I think that if i had the time to learn how to code, that would defently be the approch i would take, but sadly my coding skills are righting macros in excell LOL.

blenditall:
Funny you should say that, I worked out that if they were to get a 0.5 second fade like they asked the animation would last over 2 hours, So we agreed to fade in the poles in groups so we cut the number of fading objects down to about 60. Thanks.

Ok I have a soloution that is working in tests.

the objects move to layer 2 and 10 secounds later move to layer 1, I have a third layer that has a shaderless object that acts as a value for the fade viar its RGB IPo. Its is then composited in the node based compositer so there is no need to use the sequence editor

Link to movie:
Movie
Link to .Blend:
.Blend

The main issue i have with this approch is going to be lining up the fade to the layer change but im using a 10 frame repeat so that if i stay to 10 frame intervels i should be ok.

[MCHammond]

Updated the sample file to include shadows

Movie:
Movie

.Blend:
.Blend