In this quick Blender 2.5 tip we take a look at an easy way to make objects appear or disappear during an animation. This technique works by animating the layer a object is placed on.
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This is genius!
Perfect!! Now I can link to this from my site instead of rewriting the tutorial I wrote for 2.49!! And I love the color coding and how simpler this became in 2.5 – a very intelligent way of managing objects.
Cheers to you!!
One method I’ve played around with to get an object to slowly fad was with having a boolean modifier on the cube set to difference then animating the second cube to slowly scale over it to make it fade. I had the wave modifier on the second cube in one test for some interesting results. I think it has the same limitation as animating the transparency as you’d still have the objects in the scene afterwards, but once invisible you could animate them to go off camera easily enough.
You could also animate the render checkbox in the outliner to be able to keep all objects on their layers…
how can the blender community thank you for all the good you and the Blender cookie crew does for us?
Thanks a lot! I even didn’t known that these properties can be animated
)
to keep the scene clear and fade in objects its possible to move an invisible object (material alpha 0) to a layer and animate the alpha then. works grat too
When I get more money, I’m totally gonna get citizen and buy all the dvds : )
Nice tip Jonathan!
Hey.. great to see another animation tutorial… I think there should be some more of those.
What about making a turorial serie or a training serie, going over making an intire film, from start to the end. I know it would be a whole lot of work, but it would be real cool. I think a lot of people would learn something from that. I would at least be really interrested in making different scenes, armatures, animations, all of that stuff. into a real film, that is not just one object in one scene..
Blue Sky Studios have a really good description of the film production process (Blue Sky Process).
They have an overview, and a detailed description of what each department does and what key skills and backgrounds their staff possess in each production step.
Pixar also have a similar section on their site, which provides a little more detail on information flow between departments. Dreamworks too have such a section.
These sites are provideing a ‘top-down’ view of the process, while Blender Cookie et al. are providing a ‘bottom-up’ view. To help bridge the gap it’s useful to watch the making-of documentaries on DVDs, particularly the special editions.
I haven’t got it yet, but the Sintel DVD box from the Blender store looks like an excellent source for the kind of information you’re asking for!
I have Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish by Roland Hess. That goes through the entire process from storyboarding to recording sound, etc. Although it came out in 08 so it uses Blender 2.45 judging by the screen shots in the book. There is a lot of non software specific chapters though so it may still be worth looking into.
There is also Blender Studio Projects: Digital Movie-Making by Tony Mullen and Claudio Andaur but I don’t have a copy of it to speak from experience.
thanks, nice tip indeed.
You can also press ‘i’ on the eye icon in the outliner, that way you can gradually let it appear.
Apparently you can’t change the interpolation mode to bezier with the method I wrote earlier.
Like Lucaro said you can also animate the render checkbox in the outliner to achieve the same result. I wonder though, are there any pros and cons in doing it either way?
By the way, as inspiration for ways to use this tip, check out an animation I did that simulated keystrokes on a computer screen. Just click the link on my nickname (that’ll take you to my blender blog) then find the Barney’s Recommendation category on the right. If you’re a How I Met Your Mother fan, I promise you’ll like it
Thanks for the very useful tip, Jonathan.
I tried the method of keyframing the visibility icon in the outliner, but in practice the render icon also needs to be keyframed too. The problem when I tried it was that in the dope sheet and graph editor, the entries disappear at the same time as the object, which at the moment makes the approach unusable, which is a shame, as it would be a simple, direct method.
It is so useful to be able to control visibility in a simple way on an object by object basis, particularly in complex scenes, and I’m not sure that the outliner or the main properties panel is the best place for it – perhaps a checkbox (still animatable) on the slim transform properties strip might be a good place.
In Maya, visibilty can be managed via the channel box, which is straight-forward, and via the attributes panel, which also includes other useful checkboxes like (not visible but) render in reflection, which is really helpful in breaking down scenes for render passes.
In fact, a dedicated and separate channel box and editor would be a very useful addition to the Blender window set, as it would be helpful to sometimes set up just the handful of key-frameable attributes needed for a particular animation in an easily accessible and visible place without having to manage a number of different windows for the task.
Note that as of 2.56a this method doesn’t work with objects that are linked to other objects which are animated, but if you grab the latest trunk it should work.
Also, it would sometimes be way better to just have and leave objects on different layers and then choose which layers are actually rendered by animating the scene layers in the render tab from the properties window. Unfortunately this doesn’t work yet, and I’m eagerly waiting for the next beta or rc release
I made a little typography animation by animating the layers!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYTMdDrK30c