Animation offset/delay for multiple objects

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello, is there a way to offset the animation slightly on multiple objects?
https://i.imgur.com/mftGhWh.mp4
I did it here manually by offsetting every single piece by adding a slight delay, I’m looking for a less time consuming method to do this since it’s a super popular effect in c4d after effects etc so it’s kinda odd that blender doesn’t have an easy way to do it unless I’m missing something

this thread is describing the same issue but the fix is using a script, is there any other way besides scripting it? seems like a great opportunity for an add-on

2

This will get you part of the way there, but I don’t think its quite what you want. I animated the empty for the first 20 frames and then the object for the remaining 20.

array-mo-graph.blend (550.1 KB)

1 Like
3

You should try Animation Nodes add-on, which is the best workframe for motion graphics and procedural/parametric animation for motion graphis and vfx.

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4

Oh that’s interesting I’ve never tried the array object offset before, quite useful although it’s still limiting

5

Yeah I’m aware of animation nodes but i thought blender might have it natively

6

It’s free, so it’s not a big deal in my opinion.

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7

Animation nodes looks incredibly powerful, but to me, looks like a pretty steep learning curve. There are some pretty nifty examples in the manual though. @ARC9 Yeah I realized after I posted that you wanted a delay.

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8

Yeah the learning curve is pretty steep since i’m pretty bad with math and node logic

9

i would be learning houdini if the cost was what’s stopping me lol, i find animation nodes kinda difficult

10

Animation Nodes isn’t that difficult. It’s more practice. However, you can check Commotion. It’s a very nice add-on that emulates some mograph effects very easily. You can offset keyframes as you wish, and its pretty easy to use.

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11

Years later and with the help of ai i was able to create an add-on that makes it easy to do this, it automatically copies the object into an array and adds an offset
blender-array-animation-offset-addon.py (4.8 KB)