Well I've got an animated sky in Zephyr Cove now. I was shooting for something close to Noloben, however, finding a good sky texture that will work like that is a bit hard. I'd make one, but while I can make some decent textures here and there with Gimp, I'm no master at it for sure. Of course I can keep trying.
Still, I found a sky texture that was partly cloudy, scratch that, MOSTLY cloudy, with no obvious source for the sun light. Using Gimp, I made it seamless, and kept it very high resolution (I've found that with large objects, like the sky, if keep lowering the resolution, it looks like crud and the details get washed out.
Prior to this, I was working on my water texture. I know that one of the only ways that we'll get the water to look good is once we have that waveset available. Still, for now, I can work on the water's edge. Again, I was shooting for something like the waters edge in Noloben. Their ripples there look more like foam and move back and forth like you would expect (no white ripples that radiate outward constantly like we see all over Uru).
First, I needed to make a duplicate of the edge mesh, and lower it down a little bit. I made a "dark" filter using Gimp. This way when you look down and through the semitransparent animated foam, the sand will look darker, as one would expect we sand to look like. Got that done with no problems.
Went back to the original edge and changed the texture from the ripples to one that looks a little more foamy. I deleted the ofs of the animation that I had before, and put in a new one. I set the first frame with the texture at 0 for the Yofs, then paused.......how fast do I want this?
Right now the tutorial that Nadnerb made explains the basics and also says that 30 frames would be 1 second (if you have your frame rate in the setup set to 30 fps). We don't have a more detailed tutorial, mainly because of the time it takes to make a decent tutorial, but also I suspect because we all are still learning exactly what we can do with animated textures right now.
Okay, we'll make the foam move in one direction in about 2 seconds, so I changed the frame to 60, and made the Yofs set to 1.0.
Now, there's a short pause before the foam sweeps back out to the water, So we'll keep the Yofs at 1.0 for about another second. So I moved the frames to 90, and made sure the Y0fs stayed at 1.0.
Now time to make the foam go back, and again take about 2 seconds. So I move the frame rate to 150 and change the Yofs to 0. Since it loops that is all I need to do.
Okay, let's try it out. Export, link in.......and the damn thing isn't moving!!!!! Grrrrrr! What's going on?
Come back to the forum. Do a search on Animated textures........no not that post. No not that one......no not-what the heck are they talking about here? Not it though. Not that one, nope, not that one.......AH! Here we go.....D'Lanor mentions that he had to delete his Save for the Age......okay. We'll try that. Maybe I'll get my Bocce balls back too since they got kicked into the ocean!
Delete the sav file for Zephyr. Load Uru up. Link in......and the texture is going crazy......speed is all off and way too fast.
sigh.
Okay, let's try this again. Exit, back to Blender......
Delete all the ofs. Okay. Frame 1. Set the Yofs to 0. Jump up to frame 100, set the Yofs to 1.0. Okay, now jump to frame 300. Set the Yofs to -1.0. Okay, that gives me a very nice looking Sine Wave on my IPO graph. Let's export and look in again....
Load Uru. Link in....WTF? It's STILL doing the same.....oh yah. Ooops. Exit Uru. Go to sav folder. Delete Zephyr save file.....this is annoying........okay now load Uru back up, link in....and okay. I've got my foam moving back and forth, back and forth......still a little off and fast.
Okay thinking about this, it's not just the frame rate of course, but the size of the mesh that the texture covers. If we tell the texture to move, and give it a frame rate of 30, with the FPS set to 30, it will move the texture in one second. BUT if the face of your mesh is like 100 blender units (feet) wide, it's going to make the texture look like it's racing along. It's doing what it was told to do: scroll the texture along the face of that mesh in 1 second. So not only do you have to take the 30 frames a second into account, you must also pay attention to how large your mesh is, and how you've UV mapped it, as the ofs are the UV mapping coordinates.
So I moved to something more simple again, my sky.
Due to the size of my sky dome, and how it is UV mapped, I ended up with this: 15,000 frames. In other words, I have frame 1, the Xofs set to 0. Then you jump up to frame 15,000 and set the Xofs to 1.0. What that got me was my clouds slowly, very, very slowly rotating around the sky dome like in Noloben. Of course they have other things in Noloben to make the sun look like it is there, etc. But this is a good start.
Hope this post helps others that are working on animated textures when they do a search. I'd make a tutorial, but I don't know all there is to know yet about this feature. Hopefully over time we'll get enough info put together to add to Nadnerb's tutorial a bit.
Guild of Writers
Here's a link to the Wiki. For texturing your sky dome, it works great for me!
