Changing material based on time or frames

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi all,

Just a newbie, terminology might be a bit rough. I’m trying to find a way to make a row of budlights ‘chase’ during an animation based on three points of flashing.

I have more or less acheived what I am after using particles and altering their life span and quantity in a given number of vertices and over a calculated number of frames but I was hoping there might be a simpler solution.

Is there a way of changing an object’s material back and forth between two different materials at regular frame intervals without having to manually key frame the changes in?

I would need to have the object’s material set to say material “x” for say 5 frames and then set to material “y” for double that - 10 frames and then keep repeating this for up to the vicinity of 5,000 to 10,000 frames.

Anyone know if this is acheivable reasonably simply?

In the rendering attached, I have an object which consists of just three vertices (object is positioned so that each vertice floats in the centre of three adjacent glass covers in the row of budlights) and set it to emit halo particles (which do not move) at intervals which gives me the chasing light effect, but…

I’d like to be able to set the glass covers to emit 100% white light while the vertices inside them are emitting the halo particle. If I can change the material based on frame intervals I could probably do away with the whole particle emitting side of it too which is kinda tricky to get right.

Any thoughts would be very much appreciated. :o

Jon.

Attachments

Budlights.jpg800×600 51.5 KB

2

There are a bunch of available IPOs in the Material, Texture and Lamp Menus in the IPO window. You can easily turn the Emit IPO up and down with a simple linear curve set to Cyclic Extrapolation for a never-ending cycle. Give each set of lamps a different material then offset the curve for each material to create your flashing sequence.

Most material and texture IPOs can also be keyed by pressing I-Key over the material and texture windows.

I don’t know what’s possible with halos or particles.

3

Thanks for that. Had a feeling it would have to be done in the IPO window which I’m a little unfamiliar with but I’ll give it a go.

4

You can also use layers and duplicate objects with the different materials. you can key what layer an object is on. By moving the object to an off camera layer and moving the duplicate to the on camera layer the material will appear to change instantly.