Object-Level Alpha Slider
A simple slider in the Object Properties that acts as master alpha for all attached materials.
Whenever I need to make a demonstration video in Blender, nothing makes me hurt more than the fact that I can't make a single complex object (with multiple materials) fade in and out during a narration. Nothing slows down my day more than needing to make an object fade out and having to go into said object and alter each material (sometimes 50+ materials) to transition in unison.
I would love a slider, 0-100, that I can keyframe once that proportionally controls the alphas of all attached materials without having to create separate materials for that object and having other objects that share those materials being affected.
This has been a major issue keeping me from ditching After Effects altogether for the last 6 years. I would love to move my entire motion graphics pipeline into Blender, but this one simple missing tool is preventing that. I can't be the only person needing this, can I?
5 Comments
If an object has 10 assigned materials, this becomes more problematic. Or 100 materials in the scene.
I completely get the OP's request; having object-level transparency control in other software (2D and 3D) I've used was very nice.
an asset/entity/character might be comprised of 50 different objects with 10+ different material each. "object-level" transparency doesn't help that much in that scenario. It helps, yes, but i feel there is a better solution we haven't thought of yet.
Some sort of node based override where we can query/target the desired materials on the desired object/objects and then as 1 unit mix all of them with a transparent shader.
The other issue is fading out a render layer in aftereffects typically looks better than fading out several objects/materials in the render itself because doing it in the render would give you a semitransparent beard over semitransparent lips over semitranparent teeth over semitransparent tongue over semitransparent jawbone, etc.
what about drivers or node groups? both can be used to reference a single value in multiple materials.
That's true, but blender also allows objects to share materials. So to do an opacity change on an object, we need to convert all of its materials to unique versions. Then add all of these driver things. Drivers on material values also make the material heavier to calculate.
Someone requests that we fade a couple of other things in the scene in the same way, and now we get to do all of that again with more objects.
Of course ultimately this can be done, but the point of the suggestion is to avoid it. One does not require an extrusion tool to do modeling, but it is certainly more convenient than drawing four points and then connecting edges manually.