[nvanegeren]

I'm looking for a way to animate a kind of reverse explosion. I have an object that I'd like to have in many pieces to animate itself back together. Wind effects aren't giving me the control I need in layout so I'm trying to "explode" the object in modeler and then reassemble it with a morph in layout. I can't find a way to randomly distribute the polygons in modeler other than moving them around by hand one by one. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[leroy3rd]

Maybe I'm not understanding the problem, but, why don't you render out the explosion, then just have the frames play in reverse order in your video editing software?

-LeRoy3rd

[nvanegeren]

Yeah that's the path I first went down. I had the wind blowing the object apart but i was finding it difficult to to control the effect in the way I wanted. Maybe blowing them apart with wind isn't the best option? Also there's some animation that needs to happen after the reassembly, which because it needed to be reversed actually had to happen first. I'd really prefer to create this animation with things happening on the timeline properly, not reversed if at all possible.

[Warlock 279]

I think you're on the right track with reverse frame approach, I can't think of anything that would work to pull an object back together properly. Not without individually animating each piece anyway. Tho I can't say for certain that there's not something that would do what you want out there.

I think you're also probably best off using multiple scenes, one scene for the anti-explosion and one for whatever other animation you want to do. Make sure you set up the one scene, then save as for the next scene.

Alternatively, you could work all within one scene, at different places in the timeline and make sure to reverse the playback on the group of frames that need to be after their rendered.