Animated Texture control?

Support Materials and Textures
#1

Hey everyone

So here’s my dilema: I have a bit of video that is 50 frames long and I want to apply it to a plane to play at mulitple points during my scene but these points are not at regular intervals.

To be as clear as possible lets say I want my 50 frame movie texture to start and play at frame 25 of my timeline and then again at say frame 35 and then again at say frame 42, is this possible with one texture or do I need to use duplicate textures and have them start at these times?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Tom

#2

You can load your video into the sequence video editor, and the apply it as the material to the plain (haven’t tried it myself before).

#3

Umm there is no option in the texture panel to use anything from the sequence editor, any other ideas.

#4

Set the frames value for your movie texture to 0 (or 1, I can’t remember which) and then animate the “offset” value as needed. This is a good way to manually play through the movie, as if you were hand-cranking a projector…

#5

I can’t figure it out now, but had something to do with nodes with either material/textures.

#6

Well when you figure it out I’d be interested to see how it works.

Benu, I’m having a bit of tinker using your technique but I’m struggling a little could you talk me through your workflow, I have a movie 51 frames long that I want to start at frame 47 of the time line and again at frame 120 of the time line.

#7

OK I figured it out.

Under the textures properties you have:

• Frames - This is the amount of frames in the animation, it gives you the option to Match the movies frames with the click of a button below. This field needs to be set to 1.

• Fields - Dunno what this does, didn’t touch it.

• Start - When the animation will first be active in the timeline. I set this to 1 for this example.

• Offset - This is the key to the technique.
(My animated texture is of a smoke puff, it is 50 frames long.)
- I set the Offset to 0 at frame 0 and keyed the frame

  • Then I moved forward to the frame at which I wanted the texture to start to play, in this case frame 25 and again keyed the Offset to 0.
  • Then I moved forward to a frame that would allow the full texture to play out, so in this case frame 75 (current frame time plus amount of texture frames)and then in the Offset keyed the value to 50 (The length of the texture animation)
  • I then went to the next frame (frame 76) and keyed the offset back to 0, in effect resetting the animation to the start.
  • In the curve editor this creates a natural rise from frame 25 (value 0) to 75 (value 50) and sharply back down at 76 (value 0).

I hope this helps someone in the future, I know it is probably an uncommon problem but it could be quite a powerful solution to animating facial textures.

Tom