Curves and easing when animating camera visibility

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I want to animate the visibility of an object, it should disappear on a certain frames and reappear slowly on another later frames. I key the visibility of the object by placing a key using a right mouse click on the visibility icon. This makes the object disappear, but very abruptly and I did not see any curves that I could manipulate.

Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

Thanks

2

Visibility is a boolean keyframe: it’s on or off, with nothing in between. (And, incidentally, you need to be animating the camera icon, not the eyeball icon, if you want it to show up in the render.)

If you want a gradual fade-in, one thing you might try is to animate the alpha (transparency) value for the material you have applied to your object.

3

Thanks Benu. But would it not be tedius to animate? I would have to animate the specular and other properties of the material I have applied.

4

Thanks Benu. But would it not be tedius to animate?
If you’re too scared of hard work fade an object in/out in post processing

5

I agree with Richard except for the “hard” qualifier – this kind of material transition is quite simple. You have to set a total of 5 key frames – in the Material’s Alpha channel, there’d be a single-frame fade-out for the instant vanish (2 keys), and a multi-frame fade-in (2 keys). Then you need only set a single key in the Specular channel (or any other you feel needs this transition), then copy the curve from Alpha into these other channels. If you deem that tedious, you’re in the wrong biz, 'cause animation is all about setting keys, hundreds, thousands,and eventually even millions of 'em.

6

Personally, I would prefer to do things like this “in post,” that is to say with compositing after the renders are done, because then I can easily “tweak” the results. It basically becomes an editing task rather than a rendering task, and as long as I’ve got the various necessary layers of data captured in MultiLayer-format files, I can make decisions of exactly when and how-fast the object should fade … and do so on-the-fly.

7

Thank you all for the tips. Maybe my choice of the word “tedius” was wrong. I come from the Cinema 4D world, anything repetitious should be done using COFFEE scripting. I will look into the Blender API

8

You didn’t mention repeated keys earlier – do you mean a particular key sequence that is repeated a number of times or forever? There are a number of tools and methods for doing this in Blender without resorting to scripting.