Billboard Particle Animation

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Hi,

I am working on a billboard animation in Blender 2.55 and I want to use an animated texture. As the scene is presently constructed, the animated textured plays synchronously on all the billboards. I need the texture animation to start fresh at the beginning of each billboard’s life. Is this possible and if so, how do I create this effect?

(sorry if this is the wrong section)

2

Hi, the only way I know is using a uv split, and it’s a bit weird… you need to create an image strip of your animation, generate an empty uv and load the image texture mapped to that uv. The sequence should be split in rows and columns, with frames manually arranged like this:

 
 +------+------+------+
 |      |      |      |
 |  1   |  2   |  3   |
 |      |      |      |
 +------+------+------+
 |      |      |      |      in this example
 |  4   |  5   |  6   |      the number of splits is 3
 |      |      |      |      and the total frames 9
 +------+------+------+      you need to animate time
 |      |      |      |      in billboard settings
 |  7   |  8   |  9   |
 |      |      |      |
 +------+------+------+

If you just want a color change then it is a lot easier…

3

Thanks for the advice but I don’t think that method will be practical because my animation is 360 frames long. I will happily take some advice on the basic animation of billboards though (such as animating colour, scale, or opacity over time) and I might be able to devise an alternative solution.

4

For the color to particle life thing:

in object data panel create a new uv for the emiter -and remember the name-
create a blend texture, linear horizontal is fine, map to uv
type the uv name in the Billboard Time Index field and you are done

you can edit the color and alpha in the texture through the ramp settings
the blend will be mapped to the particle’s life from left to right

Halo particles have been recently updated to do something like this… you may have already seen jahka’s blog. Not a clue about scaling, other than the uv split trick.

5

Thanks for the tips I was able to get the alpha to animate over time, I’ll keep trying to figure out how to animate the scale. I remember being able to to this is Blender 2.49 so it shouldn’t be impossible.

6

Another way to approach this is to make a plane and add your animated map to the plane.
Then add the plane to a group.
Move it to an unused layer. You will not be rendering these planes, only the particle system.
Then duplicate the plane a number of times. Say 15 times.

Now you have 16 planes with the same exact animated map.
Go into each plane and make each material unique and offset the starting frame of each animated sequence. Offset them incrementally. So image 1 starts at frame 0. image 2 starts at frame 30 etc…

Then, in the particle system use display type of group. DO not choose pick random or dupligroup. By leaving both options unchecked the particle system will simply cycle through each member of the group sequentially.

The particle system will then be able to generate at least 16 different starting versions of your animated image map.So you see the work flow. The more copies you make for the particle system to pick from, the more diverse your animation will be.