The workflow for animating hundreds of objects in blender is frustrating.

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m trying to animate a scene with a large amount (1550+) of objects and blender is not treating me well. I’m hoping that maybe I just don’t know the tricks and someone will tell them to me.

I can insert multiple keys at once on a multi-selected group, but what if I want to key frame a value on a shader? All the objects have a “matching” value in each of their respective shaders, but there is no way that I know to key the value of each shader all at once. I have to painstakingly insert one key at a time on hundreds of objects. I can’t constrain them to a slider, btw, since each animation needs to be adjusted for timing afterward. Not to mention adding the constraint to each channel would likely be a one-at-a-time affair as well…

I know that I can link animation data between objects and the make them unique (allowing me to animate one object, then copy its data to all the rest), but again, this doesn’t work for animation data that’s not part of the “main set” of animation channels. Meaning nodes animation seems to be a no-go.

How can I can copy node animation to all other selected objects at once? All shaders are unique, but they share matching values (in this case, factor on the mix shader node). Am I just doing it wrong?

Thanks for the help, everyone!

2

look the keying sets. maybe it’s hard to set-up the first time, but then with the i key and the correct keying set you can add keyframes for all your objects. try this:
create a new keying set named myObjects in the scene tab. to add fastly the channels, you can select and object and in the properties panel right click over location -> add all to keying set. you are going to see the new slot in myObjects keying set. repeat for 2, 3, 4 objects.
Then, with the keying set selected in the timeline, only press i and all the keys are inserted.

hope useful. bb

3

Thanks for the tip. This seems like it will work well as long as I properly plan this ahead of time. After everything is already built it remains cumbersome, but at least it’s possible to make this run smoothly for something similar in the future.