Animating a hole in a mesh

I’m looking for a way to animate a hole appearing in a mesh, a bit like starting with a solid wall, and making a window appear in it.

I’ve used shape keys to modify meshes, but can’t figure out a way to animate the deletion of faces from a mesh, or to replicate that some other way.

In principle, the wall has faces (like bricks) that could be deleted to reveal a hole in the wall. Or better still, gradually open a hole from a tiny point to a full square window shape. The final hole will be square. I’d prefer to show a gradual transition from a complete wall to a wall with a square hole in it than just have a hole appear from nowhere.

Can anyone offer any advice please?

Thanks

This thread should not be in General Discussion, I would have put it in the modeling support area.

Shapekeys store mesh data. So in order for it to work the mesh data must be there to start with. You cannot add or delete verts and store them as working shapekeys.

For this problem I would recommend setting the area that is going to be a hole with a seperate material that is identicle to the material on the rest of the wall(same texture, UVmap, etc.) Then use key frames to store changes to the material of the seperate material.

Once you have hit the point on the time line where the hole must be cut change the material to transparent and set a keyframe. This will cause the material to fade to transparent.

depending on the complexity of the cutout, you could use the boolean modifier.
that way you could animate a second mesh to cut the hole into your primary mesh.

You may be able to get interesting effects by using Build Modifier.

Hi,

You mean something like this?

Scroll the timeline
wall.blend (529 KB)

Cheers