Fading animation?
 

How do I animate some geometry fading to complete transparancy or visa versa? I presumed I could key the materials transparancy, then after a few frames key it again but with the slider at the other end of the scale. :confused:

you can try it that way to see if it's what you want, or you could render said object out on a different layer and then after compositing it into the shot, animate the opacity of the layer...

i tried it the way i mentioned but it didnt work :S presume you cant alter the opacity that way

well, what did you end up getting instead?

the geometry stayed visible, the whole way through :(

hmmm... what settings are you trying to key, and how are you going about keying them?

i just created a sphere and animated the material's transparency from 1-24 frames, and it fades in from nothing to solid just fine.

in the material's attribute editor i keyed transparency (after choosing full black) by right clicking on the word transparency and chose 'set key', then scrolled over to frame 24 and did the same (but with full white), set the render globals, and after loading it into imageready to take a look, the only thing that stayed the same throughout the animation was the specular (which i just didn't animate along with the transparency), so it worked ok here...

check it out:
http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l3...arencytest.gif

Neo, have a pint on me :beer: , I simply changed the slider, highlighted the geometry and pressed s in the timeline for both ends of transparancy. :bow: Thanks for that!

well i hope it works for you! :)

Almost works a treat, except for as you say, it doesn't ever go completely transparant :S which is a problem

i kinda figured you'd want to tackle that next so i played with some options... i'm going to assume that if you use a lambert you won't have to worry about specular anything, and it'll go from there to not without having to tweak anymore... i was using a blinn, and i found that although animating the eccentricity from 0.000 to the default value of .300 DID get rid of my specular highlights hanging out, the object went from no specular to super shiny (small, focused highlight) to kinda dull (larger, faded highlight)... if the animation from solid to transparent were short enough i don't think people would mind... or you could always try using that lambert shader instead ;)

I've been playing about with most of the setting but im still getting the same or similar out put which is... below, even if i use a lambert which is strange

ok, i've think its down to the hdr sphere i am using if i render without it the text is completely transparant, so my next question is, i need the sphere in the scene to render but not let it effect/ influence the text geometry, any ideas?

oh you're using hdri! there's some stupid mental ray option that you have to check (or uncheck, can't remember it at the moment) that states that hdri images won't show in transparent objects... that's what you're seeing.

Hmmm...any ideas where this check box is? I've been searching but can't find it as of yet

come on Neo, I know you are lurking around these here parts somewhere... ;)