Unfortunately, ever since their inception, modifiers in Blender haven’t let you animate their settings. This is a real pain, and a motivational hurdle against people making lots of nice new modifiers like ‘bend’, ‘twist’, ‘taper’, etc. I really hope this gets addressed soon, but until then, here’s an ugly workaround which will let you animate modifiers using the bPython API.
Basically, you need to create a dummy object that you will animate in a simple manner just so you have an editable Ipo animation curve. From there, use a scriptlink set to onFrameChange to read that Ipo and manually set the modifier paramater you’re interested in to the curve’s value at that point in time. You can download my demo .blend file to see how this works (remember to enable script links in the scripts button tab), or check the demo video below to see an animated Decimate modifier.
wow that’s really cool!
the question is, how long is it going to take until blendernation finds out and posts about this… again 🙂
i really enjoy reading your site, keep it up mate!
.andy
Hehe, thanks! 🙂
Well, I don’t mind the publicity. I wouldn’t go to the trouble of writing this stuff up if I didn’t want to share it with anybody, so as far as I’m concerned, the more people that it gets out to, the better.
I would be very happy though to see more variety from more people doing this sort of thing (tricks, experiments, r&d type stuff) and writing about it. I’m always curious to see what sort of tricks or inventions other people have figured out.
cheers buddy, hope you’re doing well
Cool!! the “trick” is very usefull for a lot of things.
I’d certainly find the feature(s) useful.
Now if only:
A) It would get directly implemented in Blender.
B) We could connect it to a “Distance” Node with a camera, to do realtime / rendertime LOD. (Yes, I’m speaking Houdini.)
well you really could just use this and a pyDriver to set up LOD.
this is awesome.
This is a manual trackback. I’ve just used this trick to decimate objects based on their respective distance to the camera. Please have a look and comment:
http://tech.toomuchcookies.net/8/animating-modifiers/
Very nice Matt. Thank you for sharing the trick.
Greetings,
Satish.
Before I break my head with this I rather ask;
is it posible to do the same with displacement modifier using diferent displacement maps like in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxMWP7Ciuc
Thanks for any ansver!
Aleksander
you made me happy,
what an important script for motiongraphics, etc..
thanks
thank you very much…
and… ‘suzanne’?? lol
🙂
hugs
Ace