Rendering Transparent objects with the Cell Fracture addon? Is there a way to render transparent objects that have been pre-fractured with the Cell Fracture addon?

I know you can kind of get this to work by parenting the original object to one of the shards (or simulating it by itself) and swapping the visibility of the objects when the shards fly apart:


However, It is obvious that it suddenly breaks the entire object on impact and just doesn't really look right. (the animation is slowed down at that point so it is more visible)

Is there a better way to do this?
Take advantage of the node compositor and render layers. If you put the original (non-fractured) object on a separate render layer, you can smooth out the transition. Basically, the idea would be to reduce the opacity of the original object's render layer over the span of a few frames rather than use the hard swap that you currently have. Stretching that transition over more than a couple frames will make the change less apparent.

This can also be done from the VSE, but you'd need to either use separate scene strips or render the animation twice (once with the original object and once with the fractured object).