Animating materials as "event"?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Ok, so first of all thank you for taking the time to read through this.
Second of all I am not sure if this is the correct place to post this, but it seemed fitting to me.

So, I was already using blender for quite some time, but only casually and I wanted to get a bit deeper into it.
My Idea is that I want to create some sort of fixed event to change values in a material. I know that I can animate the values used in the Material nodes, however I wondered if there would be an easy way of more or less scripting the modification of textures. Let’s say I have a basic material using a Color node and a diffuse shader. The color node is set to red. Now I want to have a way that I can easily add an event to the timeline that changes the RGB value of the color node to a value I give to the event. The transition between red and let’s say blue should be smooth and take x seconds to complete, where x is also a value I give to the event.

Now I’m most certain that my idea will not work like this, but that’s why I asked here because I have no point on where I should start doing something like that.

I thank you very much in advance, and also apologize for my not so great english skills…

2

Short answer, yes you can. To do what you ask, you would add a color, mix node with red and blue as the colors. The mix factor, you would right click and ‘add driver’. Now you need some object to control the driver, so add an empty (or a bone), now it gets a bit harder, you select the color, mix node, and go into the graph editor and set up a driver such that the location (or rotation) of the empty or bone will control the value of that mix factor.

Here’s a test file, if the empty is z = 0 then the mix factor is 0 and suzanne is blue, z= 1 is red. You can keyframe the empty’s location, and have timeline control.
Blend on dropbox

3

Thank you, I played around with that a bit and managed to get myself some RGB-Sliders as bones to control the Color.
That really helped me a lot!