Wireframe reveal animation

Hallo All,

I’m searching for a tutorial which shows me how to create an animation revealing an object by keeping a wireframe and increasing a kind of transparency. For example this video: from ca. 33sec. http://thavis.com/arbeiten/referenzen/3d-animation-ecosys.html

Thank you very much for your help.

Probably the easiest way is to have two objects one with the wire frame and the other in Solid color… then just fade one object out as the other one is fading in…

are you wanting to do this in Cycles or Blender Internal?

You need to use number of different technique to archive this effect.

Remember that in Blender you can animate anything that has slider value. So to animate transparency you just key frame the transparency of objects material from 1 to .1 or so along the timeline. The wire frame line can be animate as well using Freestyle. Do the reverse transparency along the time line to make it visible.

Remember to set inside object material to not to receive shadows. Otherwise overlapping outer object will block outside light and will not render properly.

on your wireframe object I highly recommend the use of the wireframe modifier…

see this tutorial…

Freestyle may be another option. It seems most of its settings are animatable as well. Not only that, but you can mark specific edges in edit mode such that you have nearly exact control.

To use Freestyle you have to turn it on in render settings to make it accessible (all the other panels are hidden otherwise), and digging a bit under render layers or some of the other object properties. I’d also suggest doing the Freestyle lines on their own render layer so you have more control of how they mix-in during the animation via the compositor. (Blend in via gradients or effects like glowing edges, etc. If you have enough time, you should be able to make something just like your reference video.)

Wireframe is nice and simple, but has a few key differences vs. Freestyle. One big difference: the Wireframe material makes lines with uniform thickness. Thickness does not change as the line comes closer or farther away.

With Freestyle, you can fake it by using, not wireframe meshes exactly, but curves. I am experimenting today with using curves, each with a tiny Bevel Object (a circle). It’s tedious and I am not fond of the idea of breaking a mesh apart into separate lines, then doing the same pick-a-bevel-object each time, but that’s a way that I’ve found for not only getting Freestyle lines that vary thickness with distance, but also can be animated to draw themselves on the screen.

I might stick with Wireframe, though, because the project I’m doing now is all about lines, not solids or even polygons. It’s so weird that Freestyle, which was invented to draw lines, can’t draw lines on your 3D model unless the model has faces, not merely lines. I’d get this done so much quicker if I could just make a connect-the-dots model that has no faces, but lots of lines connected to vertices, and render those lines.