I am having a difficult time trying to use a movie as a texture.
I have made a character for whom I want to use a movie for the animated eyes and mouth rather than animating the mesh itself. I have a Quicktime movie already setup for this with an alpha channel.
However, when I use a movie the renders just display the still image that the textures dialog box demands (above the field for the movie file).
How can I get the movie onto the mesh as a texture?
Using Blender 2.54.
Confirmed bug, Blender 2.5 does not seem to support the alpha channel of a quicktime. It does seem to detect the alpha channel in a quicktime. It reports RGBA. But when it comes to rendering it, it fails to honor it.
Just use an image sequence like PNG with an alpha channel and it should work.
I just tried two different output codecs. Quicktime Animation with Alpha and Quicktime Motion PNG with Alpha. Blender failed to honor the alpha even though it detected it in each movie file.
What codec are you using?
Thanks for your response.
I am using Quicktime with Animation as codec.
What single image should I use in the image field?
And how do I import a PNG sequence into the movie field?
You just browse to the first one in the sequence as if it were a still, then switch to Movie if Blender does not detect it automatically.
I use PNG most of the time. TIFF is another one to consider, especially if you plan on doing any RIB work. Most RIB renders are so limited in their input section that all they can read are TIFFs.
Never output an alpha channel with QT codecs, png and tga sequences fits well blender, tiff is more tricky, got to try …
Quicktimes with alpha do work in truly professional apps it is just Blender that is failing.
Hi guys. I’ve bought some video files from Videocopilot.net (the Action Essentials 2 pack). It seems like some of the files are working fine with Blender and some are just not working. The files are all in quicktime format. All with alpha channel. These files are recognized correctly (there is an information about quictime RGBA file inside blender in the texture tab), but alpha channel is used. In other files the alpha channel works just fine. I’m using Win XP 32 bit. Do you know any workaround? I think that this will not get fixed soon. Any ideas?
The work around is simple. Just render out the Quicktime movies from After Effects as a PNG, TIFF, or TGA RGBA sequence. Then supply that sequence to the texture channel instead of the Quicktime.
That would be really easy if I had After Effects ;). I’m not using AE, I’m still low budget guy.
EDIT: OK, I’ve found, that you can buy Quicktime Pro (it’s 30$), and you can export mov files as image sequences, for example PNG. The export supports alpha channel. That will be my workaround for now. Thanks for your replies.
Ha, yes Blender is usually my go to for making and reading image sequences. Oh well.
.mov is the container the format is within it, sounds like differing formats have you checked to see what they are with mediainfo or similar? Perhaps this is due to differing levels of support within ffmpeg.
All with alpha channel. These files are recognized correctly (there is an information about quictime RGBA file inside blender in the texture tab), but alpha channel is used. In other files the alpha channel works just fine. I’m using Win XP 32 bit. Do you know any workaround? I think that this will not get fixed soon. Any ideas?
Why not use an older build of blender 2.5 that had Quicktime SDK compiled? Sounds like ffmpeg is trying to do this where as Quicktime SDK would have done it previously for movie textures.
Probably not worth the effort for $30 but Avisynth would probably do what you need to get image sequences, using DirectShowSource.
If the dev building FFmpeg for Windows Blender builders had enabled .avs support in FFmpeg, then you’d probably been able to do a direct import of various Quicktime specific formats into Blender without the QT SDK been compiled in.
And I’ve asked the question why Avisynth support has not been enabled, rationalisation across platforms was the gist of the answer.
Haven’t looked but doesn’t MpegStreamClip offer image export.
MpegStreamClip can export image sequence but it doesn’t support alpha (At least I didn’t find the way to get access to alpha), so in this case it’s useless.