I would like to animate 1 main object to SWITCH it with other objects.
The idea is to keep the same place of the original main object while switching any other object I like to choose.
Just to be clear: I’m NOT talking about Shape-Keys, I want to switch to totally different objects with different amount of faces or extra objects included in it’s Edit mode or even different materials etc…
A good example is like switching pieces in Stop Motion, where they replace the Mouth Pieces for every keyframe.
One way to do this, is to arrange all the mouths at the same spot, and use a driver to control the scale from 0 to 1. This driver could then be controlled with a bone, so that moving the bone in X or Y will set different mouths to scale=1 depending on its location.
The only issue with this method of using scaling, is that it can cause issues if you use motion blur. If you need motion blur, you can drive both the viewport and render visibility instead, which also will have the advantage og slightly higher performance, as only the visible mouth shape will be rendered.
You just have to animate their visibility.
Objects can be parented to same bone, follow same armature or just be static.
Render engine will not render those that have their “render visibility” property disabled.
And you can animate that property as you want.
Interesting. Last I heard that feature got removed due to depsgraph issues or something. I remember everybody was really disappointed about that.
Now, when you try to animate the single viewport visibility (eye icon) in the current build, it just throws a message saying “‘hide_viewport’ property cannot be animated”.
The other two visibility options (all viewports & render) appear to be working again, though. So that’s nice.
Is the single viewport visibility going to remain non-keyable?
To be honest it sounds a bit more complicated than I thought, but I appreciate your help everyone!
I found this old (3 years old) addon by @neverhood311
that could work but… I’m using 2.8 so I didn’t even bother to test it, maybe he will port it if possible?
Also I added a feature request on Blender community if anyone would like to vote for such thing in the future it may be easier to do such things with few clicks:
I’m still looking for a simple solution but I guess only way is the viability or masking or moving object position to replace them manually on the timeline using keyframes… any other solutions are always welcome, thank you everyone!
I found this old (3 years old) addon by @neverhood311 that could work but… I’m using 2.8 so I didn’t even bother to test it, maybe he will port it if possible?
Thanks for the plug! I have already updated all existing features to support Blender 2.80. It’s still a WIP but you can find that version on the 2.80 branch here: https://github.com/neverhood311/Stop-motion-OBJ/tree/2.80 The master branch of Stop Motion OBJ only works with Blender 2.79. I’ll be merging my 2.80 branch into master shortly before the final release of Blender 2.80.
Stop Motion OBJ loads a sequence of mesh objects and lets you play them back one at a time. Each mesh appears for the same amount of time. So if you wanted to hold a specific mesh for a few frames, you’d have to copy the mesh multiple times before importing it.
If that’s difficult for your workflow, I’m definitely open to ideas for making it more flexible
But I get an 404 Error page, I will try it again later.
I’m not sure yet how to use your addon since I never did, but I must give it a try sounds like it does what I’m trying to achieve, please keep up the good work!
Ah yes, thanks for reminding me. That link is a placeholder for a release that doesn’t exist yet. To download the 2.80 version, go back to the link I sent you (in the post above), click the green “Clone or Download” button, then click “Download Zip”. Then install the addon like normal.
I’m not sure yet how to use your addon since I never did, but I must give it a try sounds like it does what I’m trying to achieve, please keep up the good work!
Thanks! If you head over to my original thread, the fourth post links to a video tutorial I did a few years ago. It’s pretty old, but it contains most of the important features.
That’s weird. Try copying the stop_motion_obj.py file into your blender\2.80\scripts\addons folder and restarting Blender. If it shows up and you’re able to enable the addon, make sure to save your preferences and restart Blender before using the addon.
