I have been fiddling around trying to make a shore break for a beach.
I’ve tried all kinds of stuff from two planes with alpha textures which go forward and backwards on top of each other but unfortunately the results are not satisfying.
The only way I see that it will be ok, is to animate the alpha texture.
But I don’t know how I could possibly do that.
Attached is the alpha-texture on the model I’ve created, do you have any ideas how I could have it properly animated to give it the effect of a shorebreak with its foam on the back?
Or do you know of any free beach shorebreak animated foam textures?
I have been searching for ages, but I couldn’t fine anything usable.
In the meantime I animated a Texture using alpha in Photoshop and saved it as a sprite-sheet.
Unfortunately blender doesn’t display it properly, the animated texture is jumping around…
How does blender read the sprite sheet? Isn’t it from top left to the right, than jumping to the second line left side to the right etc until the bottom?
Good question, got the same problem with an explosion i got, it jump well not random(every repeat cycle is the same) but it doesnt start at frame 0 and end at lets say 15.
I did the spritesheet with an animation in photoshop:
Duplicated one layer and set the blend mode do lighten (you can also try the other overlay methods).
Did an animation in Photoshop moving both layers
Exported the animation in Photoshop as render video -> you will get every single frame as a picture-file.
Created a new file and inserted every single picture in it
To speed up the process, set up a grid with the right spaces you later want to place in the pics and enable snap to.
E.g. if I have a 2048x2048 file and you have 49 frames you know that you need 7 X 7 pics in it. Therefore you have to divide it by 7 and set up the grip with a spacing of 292 pixels.
You can select all the pictures at once and drag&drop them directly in your new created file. Photoshop will import them one by one, so you can place them one at a time, which saves you a lot of time.
At the end of it, if you want an alpha channel, you can make a color range selection if you have a background color or if your pics already haven’t got a background ctrl + leftclick the layer to select the pixels with content. With that you can then create a alpha-channel out of it.
Probably this wasn’t explained too well, if you got any question, go ahead and ask
Wow, thanks a lot, didn’t know the sequence was like that, now I know exactly where the problem is coming from.
And the demo ist also really goood!! You really helped me out!
Just a quick question… how did you create the sprite-sheet?
I understand more or less how the nodes and the displacement modifier works, but I have no idea how you baked your texture out of it…
I use gimp and plugins: http://registry.gimp.org/node/27761
…sadly I have to rearrange row by correct sequence (because Blender won’t accept single row strip - or more than 16 UV per column)
Sorry, that’s not what I meant…
How did you save the pictures out of blender? How did you save the animation in blender into the single frames?
Is it a render? Please excuse all these question, but I never used the render functions in blender
