Stop-motion animate textures ?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi Everyone,

Still learning Blender. What I have is a word object with a texture, which consists of a color and columns of tiny numbers. I took the image to GIMP, and went in and colored over each of those numbers by column with a lighter color. So I had about 35 columns of numbers, making up 35 layers that I organized to create a GIF animation. When played back, the columns of numbers lit up from left to right within the texture of the word object.

Now, what I want to do is create this in Blender. Would I need to duplicate my word object 35 times and apply each individual texture, and then apply each textured object to a different layer so that I can apply each layer to a different keyframe? I hope I am making sense. I feel lost on creating this in Blender. Unfortunately, I cannot show any images I am working with because I signed an NDA.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

2

This is a mockup of the effect. I am a big advocate of using black and white masks, as they will allow you to change the colors/shaders without having the color information baked in. Most of the shaders I use the material are simple diffuse, but they can be as complex as you’d like. Have a look at the node setup and I’ll also post the blend. Feel free to ask any questions on how to tweak it to suit your needs. Here is a low res/low sample animation.

blender-text.blend (1010 KB)
Don’t forget to unpack the images!
Node setup explained:

3

Wow, awesome! Great to know this can be done! I will attempt this later this evening. I may PM you if you do not check back here if I have questions.

4

Sure, either way.