Trying To Achieve Canned 2D Animation
I'm trying to achieve a specific kind of crude animation using 2D assets in a 3D environment that I imagine working like this:
- I have an empty ("character" in the example images) with a bunch of image planes as children. Each plane is a single pose.
- I have some property on the empty that allows me to select a single one of these child images (by name, ideally) which causes that image to be visible and all other child images to be invisible.
- By keyframing that property, I can animate the character.
What actually happens to the hidden frames doesn't matter; they could be made tiny, or moved very far away, as long as they don't render or affect the scene in any way. In the examples I'm just toggling the viewport visibility to show what I'm looking for.
A way I think can almost achieve this is shape keys and drivers:
- Make the basis shape for each image plane scaled to 0 on every axis.
- Give each image plane a second shape at normal scaling.
- For each image plane, add a shape key on the parent object (which will need to have geometry, as empties can't have shape keys) which is the same as its basis shape, but is used as a driver for one of the child planes' shape.
- To animate, turn all the parent object's shapes for the frames I don't want to 0, then the frame I want up to 1.
The problems with this is it makes frame selection tedious, I would have to remember to disable the frames I don't want each time I wanted the image to change, I could accidentally put a shape at .89 or something and have it look wrong etc.
Ideally I'd just want a property that's a dropdown list of all the child planes, and I select the one I want and all the others are hidden. Is this something that's possible to achieve in Blender?