Transition FX

Morphing one object into another is a two-day job in Blender and a ten-second job in After Effects, which is why most people give up and do it in After Effects.

Transition FX builds the effect in Blender, as geometry and shader nodes you can open afterwards.

How it works

Pick a source mesh and a target mesh. Choose a transition from the preset library. Build Transition wires it up.

What you get is not a black box. It is a node setup in your scene, with the settings exposed, so you can change the timing, the colour and the density without going back to the add-on.

Stacking

One effect is rarely the shot. Add Effect layers a second and a third on the same transition — a dissolve under a particle burst under a glare pass — and Move Layer reorders them.

• Add Orbit Rings for the sci-fi hologram look
• Rebuild Glare Nodes to redo just the post pass
• Reset To Preset Look when a layer has drifted too far
• Live Rebuild to see changes as you make them, rather than rebuilding by hand

Select Untouched Meshes finds the objects in your scene the transition has not been applied to, which matters on a set with forty props in it.

The preview library

Every preset renders its own thumbnail. Generate Previews builds the whole library once, and after that you are choosing from pictures rather than from names.

Installs as a standard Blender add-on. Panel lives in the 3D view sidebar under Transition FX.