Object Node Custom Parameter Input For Eevee and Cycles to enable per object tranparency / opacity

Object Node Custom Parameter Input For Eevee and Cycles to enable per object tranparency / opacity (and probably lots of other fun things)

Being more of a motion graphics type than a cartoon animator, I have used blender for more years than I care to mention for all sorts of tasks that it is not designed for, generally making stuff for rock gigs and TV documentary shows, most recently BBC Bitesize stuff aimed at encouraging literacy in 3-6 year olds.

One thing that I often have to do and will resort to using After Effects to achieve is have lots of similar objects fade in and out, sometimes at the same time and very often with the same colour / material.

A simple example use case would be where you have multiple items of text which all need the same colour / material parameter but each would need to fade in and out at different times and sometimes with overlaps in the fades. This would easily get pretty complex to handle having a different material for each item of text (I often run into trouble forgetting to make material / texture slots unique until after I have animated loads of instances). Then consider a late production decision to change the colour of all the text. This is why this feature, though small and insignificant at first glance, would be a real boon to people in my profession.

This is the angle I come at this from and how I approached Eevee developer hypersomniac on irc recently. Their immediate response was that a custom opacity per object would be out of the question as it wouldn't fit into the bigger picture but that it would be possible to achieve the same outcome if the object node in the material system would allow custom parameters to work in this context.

For me, this simple feature would completely change the way I work with blender and might actually finally wean me off Adobe. I think it would also open up lots of possibilities for other motion graphics artists / designers.

Thanks for reading, I've tried to keep it brief.

Christian Krupa