Hello, I am new here, been reviewing the forums alot for advice in Blender before registering to ask for help, that along with many other threads and video tutorials online. I can’t seem to find answers or tutorials to my specific needs. My current headache is setting up an animation action where the textures are changed during the animation on a single grouped mesh. There are boatloads of tutorials about how to keyframe material color changes, but this is no use to me. What I want is to change the textures on the material face.
I have read alot in these forums and elsewhere, one thread suggests simply changing the texture in the channel and inserting a keyframe, then proceeding to the next one and repeating. While the keyframes show and while I have a saved action, when I press the play button to animate the sequence, nothing changes in the view port, no matter whether I have it set to textured or solid as one thread suggested. I have it set to GLSL. The yellow keyframes can be seen going active as the keyframe is passed on the timeline in the texture channel window, then back to green as it continues to the next keyframe, but again, nothing is occurring in the viewport, denoting the texture changes. Rendering out the animation shows no texture change during playback.
I have had a look at the node editor, thinking this might be the answer to my troubles, but all of the blenderWiki pages are years and several versions out of date and 99% of the video tutorials I have seen are about how to change material RGB colors during an animation sequence, not the textures themselves. The action is showing in the NLA editor as I have named it and in the dope sheet, it shows the named material with a drop-down under that showing a single ‘Active Texture Index’ listing but there is no change visible in the animation sequence of any sort.
I appreciate any help available, I know some reading this might suggest scouring the forums here, which I have done, but I cannot find any threads that specifically address this issue. I can’t imagine that this cannot be done, texture changing seems to be an obvious ability within Blender, else why would the texture channel be keyframable at all?
What are you exactly wanting to do. To play a movie file or image sequence as a material texture ? In this case you would load the movie/image sequence as any other image format. Set the frame range and ensure you enable the ‘Auto Refresh’ option so it updates on a frame change. This updates in the viewport in GLSL textured view like any other UV mapped image texture
One single solution is not best for all circumstances. Therefore tell/show us exactly what you have and show us exactly what you want to achieve
Post the blend file you have at the moment and (IMPORTANT) include all relevant textures
thanks for your response, but I am not posting the file, it is a proprietary job. All I want is to set texture changes within the animation to key the texture changes in another interface, not play a movie file. Nothing is showing in the viewport or in the rendered animation, as I said in the post
maybe I need to be clearer. In reality, I am not ‘animating’ a texture, such as when using offset or applying a video to the surface, I have that figured out. What I need to do is set up a keyframed timeline, at each keyframe point, the texture of the mesh needs to change to a different image texture entirely, which I do manually in the texture channel list one at a time, after moving the timeline and I then insert a keyframe when the new texture is set and the previous texture is set to off (unchecked), all from the list in the texture channels. It will not be used as a video or other ‘animated sequence’ but rather for FBX export, where the marked / named keyframed points are activated one at a time via a Javascript code, changing the texture of the model when a ‘button’ is pressed on the interface, applying the code which tells the interface to change the model texture, not in a sequence, but individually. The problem I am having from within Blender is that the texture change does not appear at all in the animated sequence, nothing happens other than the keyframed sequence ‘lighting up yellow’ the texture channels window as the animation timeline runs past the keyframes. I have seen many videos where the user is moving the block for instance, inserting a keyframe but not doing anything special within the action editor or anywhere else in Blender and once they are finished adding keyframes they can either press play or grab and drag the slider back and forth on the keyframe timeline and their animation plays out in the viewport. As I said, nothing of the sort happens with the textures
You’ve got an experienced Blender guru offering one-on-one training here, the least you can do is make it easier for him to help you.
Create a new simple scene with similar animated grouped mesh and similar textures. It doesn’t need to give any hints to your project, but simply create the same conditions of your problem.
Post it here and hopefully you’ll learn techniques that can be applied to future projects.
ok, so here is a basic file with some textures and animations setup with the texture changes keyframed in. Or should I say the ‘not-texture-changes’ keyframed intexturechange_test1.blend (566 KB)
I can’t upload the rest of the textures, there is a three file limit and I can’t delete the previous files from the upload list. I suppose you could use any textures in place of the others in the blend file, the end content doesn’t matter, it is the technique of changing the textures that I am after
