Object visibility slider
At the moment you can control soft visibility with Alpha channel in the material. So you can gradually fade objects visibility.
But if you have many materials attached to the object, you have to control it in alpha channel of each material. Needles to say - you have to duplicate materials for every object you need to control alpha. It can make a mess.
It would be great to have a "visibility slider" with value 0 - 1 which is not related to material but works like alpha slider in shader.
5 Comments
I am not sure exactly what you are asking, but I recently made a patch that adds an alpha output socket to the Object Info node for Blender 3.2. Could you use that to solve your problem?
Let me explain. You have an object. And you want it to slowly vanish. During, let's say, 25 frames. If you have one material attached to it, you simply animate alpha (or transparency) from 1 to 0 during thos 25 frames. But if you have 10 materials attached to different slots you have to animate 10 alpha channels.
Let's complicate it a little:
If you have more of these same objects (with 10 materials on them) and you want to animate alpha for each one of them in different moments... you have to duplicate all those materials for all of these objects and animate 10 alpha values for each material for each object..... and so on.
One "visibility slider" for entire object would solve the problem.
You can find it in most major 3D packages and I thought it is a standard rather than a misterious feature ;)
Please can you tell me how to use this patch? I'd like to animate my collection's opacity – and hope this will help me.
in material, add "Object info node" and connect "Alpha" socket to materials Alpha.
Now in Object Properties find Viewport Display. In there you'll find "Color". Alpha value of this color is now attached to Object Info node.
If you animate this alpha value, all materials attached to this object will change it's opacity. And it works per object. So when you have this material on multiple objects, Object Info node will read Alpha value only of object you animated.
Brilliant solution, thanks for this information :)