Playing an image sequence

[Aloys]

Without going as far as that it could be useful for some animated textures that are hard to properly pull off with particles.. We would just have to use them very sparingly...

[Jojon]

I'm guessing tach's problem is with not getting discrete offset shifts, but spline ones.(?) Can we use non-Bezier interpolation?

[tachzusamm]

Prcc is a command line tool that comes with the libPlasma tools zip. The "c" at the end stands for "compile". This will make prc XML (the stuff you can view in the alpha version of PlasmaShop 3.0) into a Uru Object File (uof) also known as Plasma Object (po) file. This object can be imported into your prp by write clicking on the page and selecting "import" in PlasmaShop. Prcd decompiles prps and uofs/po's. This can make the objects you export from PlasmaShop into prc XML.

Usually editing/adding stuff to a prp works something like this:
#1. export a certain Uru object from your prp
#2. use prcd to make it into xml
#3. edit the xml
#4. use prcc to make the xml back into an Uru object
#5. import the Uru object back into your prp after deleting old copy that's still inside the prp
#6. update the sum
If you want to put a completely new object in, start at step 3.

Thanks for this brief description, Lontahv. It's pretty clear now.
Seems the whole embedding video thing is best done with an age nearly finished, because changes patched into the prp will be overwritten on each new export from Blender/PyPRP.

I'm guessing tach's problem is with not getting discrete offset shifts, but spline ones.(?) Can we use non-Bezier interpolation?

True, that's the main problem with image sequences. Seems an image strip gets shifted like a magnetic tape rather than a film strip even if Interpolation Mode is set to Constant.
But I found a solution recently; assume you want a discrete step between key frame A and B, insert the same value of the A shift very close before the B value (let's call this A'), so it "interpolates" for example 95% of the time between A and A', and 5% between A' and B, which is not really noticeable. You may have to scale the curve up in x direction prior before doing this (e.g. scale x 20), then inserting the additional keys (imagine them as latches), and scaling it down after that.
Works fine, with some jitter sometimes - but hey, makes it look a bit more like D'ni video technology.


Example IPO curve:

IMS1.png (2.9 KiB) Viewed 1840 times

Detail:

IMS2.png (2.73 KiB) Viewed 1840 times

[Jojon]

Aha, so we CAN have keys "between frames" (i.e. not just on frame nnn.0000, but nnn.0001, as well. 'had assumend not. :P). Good to know!

One little tip about the IPO curve editor: Hold down ctrl+MMB, now moving the mouse scales the view, X and Y independently.