Material overrides / transparency

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi,
Please let me know if this is the wrong spot, it could possibly fit in several areas.

Using Cycles in Blender 2.73a.

I have several objects with the same material in a scene. I want to change the transparency of one of the objects during the animation, and found several tutorials on using nodes to add Transparent BSDF with a mix shader to animate transparency.
However, it affects the transparency of all objects with that material simultaneously.

Possibilities:

  1. Is there a better way of handling this scenario?
  2. Is there a way of creating a transparency material that overrides the existing material?
  3. Is there a way of linking/inheriting the properties of the existing material one-way such that I can add the transparency data without affecting other objects with this material, but still inheriting the other characteristics?
  4. Is there a way of duplicating an existing material so that I can edit it? (this wouldn’t be a good solution, because if I changed the original material, I’d need to replicate the changes manually on the new transparent material too).

I’d like to keep the materials the same between the objects, and just animate transparency if I can.

Thanks for any help/advice you can provide.

–Jakra

2

Show us something and supply a demo blend file with the materials and showing clearly what exactly you want. Much easier than having to decipher vague questions. We have no idea how you have set up the materials which could affect the best solution in your particular case. Have you used material nodes, if so we don’t know how you have set them up etc etc

3

You can use object index in your material setup (Input -> Object Info):

2015-03-21-163607_1680x1050_scrot.jpg1680×1050 358 KB

In this example, any object with that material that has a Pass Index in its properties set to a value greater than 10 will have transparency mixed in: Greater Than node gives 0 when false and 1 when true. You can animate the Value.

4

Brilliant! That worked perfectly!

Thanks Stan.