Guild of Writers

I've been trying to use animated textures to try and bring the ocean in my age to life, but I've been running into some problems. I have 2 specific questions.

Question 1:

First, to simulate the ocean, I have a 2 layer texture. Each has been assigned a different UV Map with different size and angle. The first, is a solid base layer of the ocean. It's been animated as described in the Animated Textures Tutorial on the Wiki to Translate the x from 0 to 2 over the course of 300 frames. The second layer is an alpha version of the ocean. This one is animated to translate y from 0 to 1 over the course of the 300 frames.

So I export it. Head into Uru. And..

The bottom solid layer is not moving, the second alpha layer is moving. Both layers have the same UV map.

I go back into blender, and change the second layers animation so that it animates in both the x and y.

Back in Uru, the bottom layer is still not moving the second layer is moving the same way it did before, and a third layer has appeared with the updated animation settings.

Am I just running into what is probably a new and still buggy feature of the plugin, or is there a proper procedure?


Question 2:

To simulate wave crashing against the shore, I created a new plane with a foam ring texture in the shape of the island, I wanted to have it grow and shrink, but blender doesn't want to record the keyframes for the scale properties. Is there a work-around?

I can answer question 2. Currently PyPRP only supports offsets.

The support for animated textures is brand new, and although I can't speak for the developpers, it is likely to still contain some remaining bugs.

Wait, we have animated textures now? When did that happen?

With in the last week, I think. It's still somewhat limited, but brings great potential. The also added avatar shadows. Download the latest plugin to try it out.

Er, I'm kind of a pyprp dev--I programmed some of the classes for animated textures.

So, about the bugs: Yes, there are some bugs, but I think it's not so much bugs in the plugin, as it is blender weirdness, just try different things--I know it works. I think it's likely it's your fault--I really don't mean to sound mean, it's kind of... unforgiving.

Now, about the scaling textures... I just need to get it together and sit down and program it in. Paradox and the crew seem kind of... busy... and seem to be working on other stuff. So, I'm going to try to program it in (tomorrow?). More good stuff is on the way, oh, oh yeah. I think vis regions are almost done(working but buggy I think) and a dupli-vert type thing is on the way, also I'm going to try to get some sit regions working too. Also there always is rippling splashing water--this is going to be high on the list if I have any say in it.


~Lontahv

Lontahv wrote:also I'm going to try to get some sit regions working too.

Oh that would be so great! It seems we all want to make some leisury recreationnal Ages, but what's a recreationnal area if we can't have a simple bench?

Easy: put in a towel on the ground, export Blend file, link in, walk to towel, then press CNTRL-7


:runs and hides:

Lontahv wrote:Er, I'm kind of a pyprp dev--I programmed some of the classes for animated textures.

So, about the bugs: Yes, there are some bugs, but I think it's not so much bugs in the plugin, as it is blender weirdness, just try different things--I know it works. I think it's likely it's your fault--I really don't mean to sound mean, it's kind of... unforgiving.

Now, about the scaling textures... I just need to get it together and sit down and program it in. Paradox and the crew seem kind of... busy... and seem to be working on other stuff. So, I'm going to try to program it in (tomorrow?). More good stuff is on the way, oh, oh yeah. I think vis regions are almost done(working but buggy I think) and a dupli-vert type thing is on the way, also I'm going to try to get some sit regions working too. Also there always is rippling splashing water--this is going to be high on the list if I have any say in it.


~Lontahv

I in no way meant to infer that you and the development team have done anything but brilliant work. The fact that we can now animate textures at all makes me giddy. I imagine most of the problems I run into are my own fault.

I still have a couple of other options to look into, including separating the texture layers on to separate planes of geometry. I also don't plan on letting the avatar get as far down as the ocean. So that gives me some leeway. Shoot, just talking about it is starting to give me some ideas.

However going through some of the ages available through ULM, I can see the ability th create realistic bodies of water as a hot commodity. Worthy of a tutorial. I have a couple theories about how this can be achieved in a general 3D sense, I just haven't figured out how to bring it into blender and then into Uru.

The first question you had:
If you are using the 1.3.0 release of the plugin, it has a bug with animated layers where it will add two layers to the material for each animated layer, one animated correctly, and one static. This generally isn't noticeable if you're using simple textures, but if you have alpha, you can see through to the static layer. This bug has been fixed, but it is not in a release version. You'll need to grab the newest version from the SVN.

Also, your second question:
The plugin currently does not read the scale properties. This is planned for the near future, but is not implemented. However, I would suggest that it is possible to use offsets to do expansions and contractions. You simply need to offset the uv coords on a radial mesh, so that an offset up in uv is an offset outward in the view.

Lontahv wrote:So, about the bugs: Yes, there are some bugs, but I think it's not so much bugs in the plugin, as it is blender weirdness, just try different things--I know it works. I think it's likely it's your fault--I really don't mean to sound mean, it's kind of... unforgiving.

Don't discount the observations of observant users. They're right more often than not.