I’m working on a human model right now, and wanted to try using a GIF to “animate” the mouth, kinda like how studios animate mouths in animes. But when I imported the GIF and set it up, the mouth moves way too quickly, and no matter what speed I make the GIF itself, the mouth maintains its speed, I’m guessing it has to do with the speed of the blender animation itself (24fps). If that’s the case, how can I edit the speed of the GIF without changing the whole animation?
Probably better off using specific frames in one image as sprites and using the UV modifier to animate with a bone.
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Could you specify the steps I need to take to do that? I’m still a bit new to texturing and animating, so I don’t know everything.
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I’m going to take a guess here, and say that you need the GIF to be as long as your animation is, so that each frame of the GIF matches a frame in the Blender animation.
Having said that - in all my years of doing 3D, have literally never tried using an animated GIF as a texture element like you’re trying to do.
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Let me work up an example when I get home, but for now look up the UV Warp modifier.
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From what I can see here, the easiest part is to set up a plane with a UV map that is aligned to one of the images - so if you have four images, add them together as a square of four blocks in one image texture.
On that plane, select the face and snap your cursor to it. Add an Empty object to that cursor, and then with it selected, shift select your plane and parent it so that the Empty follows the Plane object.
Add a UV Warp Modifier to the Plane. Choose the Plane as Object From and the Empty for Object To. Select your Empty and move it around, and watch the UV mapping move and show the other images.
You can then key frame the position of the Empty to match your dialog, resulting in animation that is easier to control with the Empty.
Okay, so I think I did do everything perfectly, the empty is connected to the mouth part of the model, and the empty moves itself a bit in a looped cycle, which makes the mouth “talk”. Issue however is that I’m not really able to control the speed at the moment, since if I space the keyframes any further apart than 1 frame, the mouth has a halfway position between frames, which looks weird. Did I miss something?
You could work with the animation curve to make it blocky, or what I do is key frame once at the start and then again at the frame before the move so the next is abrupt. You don’t have to do anything more than duplicate the key frame and drag it over to that frame before.
This worked! Thank you so much!
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Cheers, glad you got it working. Read up on different animation techniques and keep on pushing!