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I would like to do an animation where an object that is broken in two pieces comes back together and gets "repaired".

What I did until now is to model the full object, copy it and break the copied version into two pieces.

Now, I'm starting my animation by having one of the broken piece come to the other part, and I hide the two pieces and show back the full piece.

It kind of works, but I find that the transition between the broken piece to the full piece is too abrupt. The broken pieces will also have a distinct rusted texture which I'd like also to make gradually change to another "good as new" texture.

So, as a resume, my questions are:

  • How do you make an object gradually appear or disappear?
  • How do you make a texture gradually change to another texture?
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You can use the node editor to animate the mix shader slider. this shouldn't matter what render engine your are in.

Here are two examples posted:

enter image description here <-- Blender Render (Blender Internal)

enter image description here <-- Blender Cycles

Here are the file links for you to see how it is done:

<-- Blender Render

<-- Blender Cycles

Hope it helps - Kind Regards,

RRiggs

Added in response to the comments below:

To make this a little more expressive without having to download files, here is the summary of what I would do:

The 1st question was - how to make an object gradually appear/go away.

The second one is how to do this with a texture.

The quick answer is (IMHO), add two materials to each of the objects, one of those materials needs to be completely transparent, and the other material needs to be the desired visible one.

For the second part of the question:

Two textures will be needed for each of the objects that require the texture differences.

In either case the 'mix' sliders within the node editor can be key-framed in the timeline by hovering your mouse over them and hitting the I key.

Your control over the timeline and keyframes allow you to have the control over how gradual you want the effect to be.

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    $\begingroup$ I don't think animating textures is what OP asked rather than techniques to show objects breaking apart with appropriate texture mapping. Also you could create 2 scenes in one file- it would allow to add only one file and save some space in answer as well. $\endgroup$ – Mr Zak Feb 11 '16 at 20:38
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    $\begingroup$ @RickRiggs instead of just showing pictures of the result, please show the steps taken to get there as an integral part of the answer. That way those who do download the provided files know know what to look for. We prefer answers that contain detailed information and stand on their own, and are not completely dependent on links or external files. $\endgroup$ – user1853 Feb 11 '16 at 21:56
  • $\begingroup$ I've managed to do what I wanted with this technique and using a transparent shader to make the object gradually appear. $\endgroup$ – Gimly Feb 12 '16 at 8:03

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