Some moving textures ideas

[greendragoon]

I have noted that different texture layers on the same material must be the same length.

[Aloys]

That'd explain some bugs I had recently with that. When using two layers with anim of different lenghts one would play it's animation then pause for a bit and then finally loop. But I have although seen this also happen when there are more than one object with animated textures in the scene using anim of different lenghts. (and that's using the svn version from yesterday)

[andylegate]

I'm having the same problem with my pond. At first the pond will play it's animation, then stop completely, then one of the edges with ripples will then play, then stop, the next edge with ripples, will then go, like they are all taking turns.

Now it does not do it with my pool. However the ripples and pool face have different animation lengths too.

Anyone know what's causing this?

[greendragoon]

The ripples are on different geometry?

[andylegate]

Yep. Smaller planes located around the edges. I did this with my swimming pool and had no problems at all. Did it for the pond, and that's when the animations there started doing that. But they were still working fine over at the pond.

[greendragoon]

Any chance you miss-set the keyframes? Maybe forgot to reset the current frame to 1 when you set them?

Honestly I don't know. Maybe there are still a few bugs in the plugin.

[D'eux]

Despite reading all of the above, I'm afraid that I still don't see how the speed of the animation can be successfully changed.

In my case, I can manage to get a texture to loop seamlessly from keyframes 0 -> 60, using an offset of 1.0

On the normal basis of animation, that a larger number of frames will result in a slower playback, I have changed the two keyframes to 0 and 600. The animation does successfully play at a rate 10 times slower, but the texture just snaps back after moving a short distance. Therefore, the texture is NOT completely a 1.0 unit seamless loop over a 600 frame period. So, I've both changed the 'Ofs' value to 10.0 (i.e. it moves 10x the distance) and also 0.1 (i.e. it moves a 1/10th of the distance), but neither allow the texture to loop seamlessly, only snap.

So... if increasing a 60 frame anim to 600 frames makes the texture move 10x slower, what value should the 'Ofs' be set to in order to loop correctly, because none of the normal maths calculations I'm trying seem to work and the 'Ofs' cannot be set higher than 10.0 anyway (Blender won't allow it)?

Any thoughts folks?

-: D'eux :-

[Jojon]

Ok, I haven't even tried animation and am very much a stranger to Blender, but I'll throw out a thought or two anyway and hopefully there is half a lead in there somewhere...

Offsets at start- and end keyframes, for a cyclic scrolling texture, I believe, should be START=0 and END=(total_number_of_frames-1)/total_number_of_frames (...or swapped for movement in the opposite direction) -- otherwise the first and last frame will be the same and you'll get an, admittedly barely noticeable, 1/30s hitch.

This doesn't help with the snapping textures, however. Have you checked in the IPO editor and made sure that there are no leftover keyframes from older edits and that each material has its own set of IPO curves, rather than sharing one? (that would be the little "number of users" box that is attached to the side of the IPO selector box, if there is more than one user).

It may be worth deleting any curves that are added at keyframe insertion, that one do not use. E.g; adding an Ofs keyframe seems to add curves for all three axis, which may be superflous, if one only scroll in the X direction. (It would seem that to select a curve one have to click the little colour indicator box - the word doesn't do it...)

You all know this stuff better than I, but anyway... :7


EDIT: Corrected the very simple and basic bit of maths, which I STILL got all upside down, just in case somebody uses it for reference in the future. Yikes, I hope nobody's life ever depends on my mathematics skills.

[D'eux]

Jojon,

Thanks for the thoughts/comments and you are quite right, the start and frames should normally have a slight offset to create a seamless loop. I have managed to achieve that over a 60 frame anim, but I can't yet see the relationship between increasing the length of the anim ten-fold and the limited range of the offset values permissable. I guess I've missed something somewhere because the speed is right, it's just the loop point that is way off

-: D'eux :-

[greendragoon]

The skipping problem is a know problem with the current public release. The bleeding edge copy should have this fixed. Get it here. I'm sorry but you'll have to download all the files manually. Once done, put them all into the [BlenderInstallationFolder]\.blender\scripts\ folder. That should fix that problem.

As for under standing animation it works like this.

Framerate = This is tells blender how many frames = 1 second. Changing this is kind of like defining weather your talking about 5 km or 5 mi. 30 is a good number and you really shouldn't have to mess with this. From here on out I'm assuming your using a framerate of 30.

Deciding where you put your last key frame is really about how long you want it to take to return to the starting point. If you want it to take 1 second to loop, put your start keyframe at 1 and your end keyframe at 30. If you want it to take 2 seconds, put the end keyframe at 60. 3 = 90, 4 = 120, half a second = 15.

The offset controls the direction it moves. The big thing to remember is that 0 = 1 = 2 = -1 and so on. All Integer numbers will appear the same. 1 is equal to the total width (or height depending on whether your talking about x or y,) of your texture. And the texture repeats. Think of it kind of like this:

Code: Select all

         
                         [ What You See ]
     0 = [   Texture    ][   Texture    ]
    .5 =         [   Texture    ][   Texture    ]
     1 =                 [   Texture    ][   Texture    ]


So going from an offset from 0 to 10 over 300 frames is the same as an offset from 0 to 1 over 30 frames. The only time you use an offset more that 1 is when you have multiple animated layers on the same material. Each layers animation on the same material must be the same length or you will get weird skipping or freezing. The only time you need to use an offset as high as 10 would be if you wanted one layer of a texture to be moving 10 times as fast as another layer.

One other thing to note. It seems that you can only have 2 animated layers in a material. You can have other additional static layers, but only the first 2 layers will actually move when you bring it into Uru.