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somewhat new to Blender. Always have kept my eye on it, know enough to get in to trouble. Anyways, I am in the process of creating a time lapse video of a construction site. For the past 8 weeks I have been going to site and flying the site with a drone. Coming back and processing the data in another software, creating a 3D mesh and exporting it as a OBJ file then importing into Blender. I am quite impressed so far with the results.

Looking for input on how you all would approach animating the transition from one week to the next. Keep in mind I am a newbie. Familiar with making videos in a basic microstation or autocad, but it was really time for me to up my game.

I really don't want to render the video fully each week and process it in the video sequencer. Would like to progress past that point in my life ;) looking to grow as a modeler. Initially I was thinking of using transformation with skin-wrap with shape keys. Any thoughts? Little concerned about going that route with the materials mappings. Is there a way to use two separate meshes with shape keys and keep their material mapping?

The site is a lift station for sewage, one of the holes is about 60 feet wide and will be going into the ground 50 feet other side will be going down 25 feet. Two story building on top.

excavation 1

excavaton 3

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That sounds like a really cool project, I'd be interested to see the results if you happen to post it somewhere.

As far as animating, if each stage of construction is a separate object, you can keyframe their visibility at different points along the timeline to have them transition.

For example, assuming 30 frames per second and each object stays in the scene for 2 seconds, you would start out the scene with the first object visible and the rest turned off (for rendering, not just in the viewport). At frame 1, hold the cursor over the visibility icon for that object and press i to add a keyframe. You'll want to have the other objects turned off and keyframe each of them the same way. Notice that the color of the icons changes when they're keyframed: enter image description here

Move the timeline to frame 60 (2 seconds) and keyframe Object 1 again, this will keep it visible for the entire two seconds. Now, keyframe Object 2 as visible. Move the timeline to frame 120 (0:04 in video time) and keyframe Object 2 as visible again and Object 1 as invisible. Move the timeline to frame 150 (0:05 in video time) and keyframe Object 2 again to keep it visible. I did a test in Blender with three objects and here's what the timelines looked like for all three:

Object 1: enter image description here

Object 2: enter image description here

Object 3: enter image description here

The diamonds are the keyframes, the line in between them shows when the object is in a constant state (in this case, visible).

For the rest of the objects, keyframe them as follows:

-invisible at frame 0

-visible at the end of the last object

-visible 60 frames later

-invisible at the final frame

Doing that, you should be able to just keep increasing the total number of frames as you add more objects and, each time you add an object, just render only the new frames and assemble everything in your video editor of choice. You can even add transitions between them, titles/captions, etc.

Good luck, hope that helps!

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks Jim...I will see what that looks like. It will be posted somewhere soon. $\endgroup$
    – Joseph
    Commented Aug 14, 2020 at 16:20
  • $\begingroup$ So with this proposed workflow, wont the transition betwween models be rather abrupt? $\endgroup$
    – Joseph
    Commented Aug 14, 2020 at 16:34
  • $\begingroup$ It is, yes. When I tried it yesterday, visibility of an object seems to be an all or nothing property. But you can add transitions between clips in Adobe Premiere, I'm sure other video editing software can do that as well. That's probably something I would do after rendering the individual clips, especially if you plan to add more objects later. You're not going to want to go back and re-render every single frame anyway so I would start a project in something like Premiere and create the transitions when you add new clips. $\endgroup$
    – Jim T
    Commented Aug 14, 2020 at 16:50

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