Hi List,
I´m trying to find a solution to this Problem:
There should be numbers counting up at different speeds and sizes at many places on the screen. The Numbers themselves are meshes and could be anything. The speed of the “counters” should be controlled by an IPO. It is supposed to be synced to music, therefore I made IPO markers for the beat.
I´ve tried different conceps so far which didn´t seem to work well for my thing:
Each number has it´s own layer and I made a layer IPO for each number. The Problem with this is: I didn´t find a good way to make more then one counter and to control them like single objects. Different counteranimations would mean different scenes
have all the numbers next to each other and animate the Cameraposition. This is ok for a single counter but to render like 20 counters in one picture captured with one camera…
There is a possiility to replace Meshes via actuator and Python. This is great but as far as I could see only for the GE and not controlable via IPO
The best thing would be if there is a way to replace meshes controlled by an IPO. If an animation (counter) is treated like one object. I found a possibility to move vertices this is fine nut not for this purpose
If there is a cool way which I bet there is, please let me know
Could animating the layer be an option? You can create an ipo curve that tells the mesh what layer to be on when, so you could have all of the mesh objects on layer 2, then throughout the animation, move to layer 1.
Thanks for your answer and the blend. Well this is as far as I am already…this way changing the position or the size of the counters is quite tricky since every single object will have to be edited. It´s possible to make more scaled copies by combining different scenes in the node editor…but I´m trying to get all the counters into one 3d window.
If a counter animation could be treated like an object I could e.g. put an array modifier on it, this is the thing I´m looking for.
Replacing an objects mesh would be is but I wonder how…
I can offer you a scriptlink counter that directly manipulates the text of a font object. It supports initial value, initial frame# and duration of hold on that value. If you are not afraid of a little python code, it might be easier to do this way?
Thanks for answering. This looks very cool and goes into the coolTrix folder. But for this project I need to work with meshes, since the numbers are home grown. But I found a solution which works ok:
If you are in top view I placed all the numbers behind each other with increasing z value. Then I limited the clipping of the camera so it´s only able to see the top number. The IOP animation goes in z direction towards me. This way I´m limited in camera animation but I can live with that.