How to animate objects scale within Collection using Animation Nodes?

[kurnikoff (Kamil)]

Hi!

I have a half-working solution, but it is not 100% working the way I want. I would love is someone could help me fix it. Basic set up is a Collection with few objects. I want to animate them all from centre by using sphere empty and scale.

It works ok-ish. Here is my node set up:

When Empty Scale goes down to 0.1 - last building is barely visible. But when Empty Scale goes to 0 - all buildings appear. Is there a better way to do this?

I suspect objects appear when empty sphere disappears, is because of my Vector Math - Subtract approach? I tried to find different method, but couldn’t come up with anything.

Also, is it possible to control the fall off so the buildings appear more gradually? Buildings just “pop” one after another. I would prefer the whole collection to animate in from the centre gradually.

Here is Imgur link to screenshots illustrating this problem in more detail with a GIF showing current animation. I can’t post more than 1 image per post as a new user.

Any tips are much appreciated.
Thank you.

[kurnikoff (Kamil)]

I managed to fix “pop” scale, by simply increasing Falloff Width on Object Controller Falloff node. Now, objects animate more smoothly.

However, I still have the problem of all the objects being visible, when Empty is at 0. It is annoying as I want scene to start “empty” and then animate slowly in. But at the moment, buildings are always visible in first few frames

[kurnikoff (Kamil)]

I figured it out. Here is Animation Nodes set up:

It was simple, but boy I was staring at it for hours.

Animate Empty Sphere going from 1 to 20. Place it above Collection/Object Group - in my case Z = 7. This way Fall Off won’t affect objects at all, when Sphere is at 1 size.

Set Scale to 0 in Offset Matrix and done. Here is result:

It took me way too many hours to do this, but at least now I know how to do it