Animated texture going white...?

[Marcello]

Another thing: make sure there is a curve for for all ofs! So for instance not only for ofsX, but also for ofsY and ofsZ. I had problems in the beginning when one was missing. It should assign them all by default, but you have to make sure.

Oh and another thing... could it be speed is so high you don't see the texture? Guess not but do check.

[Kierra]

Jojon first:

Well you are right to imply, I am an "old timer" that let her attention wander while all the new tools showed up and is having an extremely difficult time catching up to you young whippersnappers. Someone changed all the rules while I was gone!

I assign UV textures via the UV/Image editor window....is there a new way to do it now?? If there is I've never seen/heard of it. UV/Image editor is the only way I know how to do it. /scratchhead

Robert:

Yes, I can post a zipped .blend file....I think I figured out how to pack the .blend file. File>external data>pack file, right? What does that do?

Marcello:

I have no idea what that means...

~Kia

[Robert The Rebuilder]

I think Jojon was asking how you had created a texture record for the river texture, since we still assign textures to polygons via the UV/Image Editor - at least that had not changed!

Yes: the Pack Data option is the right choice. It will save the textures within the Blender file itself. That way, I won't have to chase you down for all the textures for the age. However, that's gonna be one big blend file.

What Marcello was referring to was the OfsX/Y/Z "boxes" on the right side of the IPO Curve editor, which you had confirmed earlier that you do have. And regarding the speed: your curve clearly shows that it is taking 30 seconds to change to a value of 1, so I don't think that's the problem.

[Kierra]

Ok I packed and uploaded the .blend file here: http://www.mediafire.com/?3fe2jsrpvjk

Um...I don't know what a texture record is

~Kia

[Marcello]

Ok, maybe this is a stupid suggestion, but it happened to me and took me a day to find out:

Are you sure it's the only mesh at that spot? With the water in my shell I also had a white plane there. Turned out I had a copy of the water plane in another layer. The copy didn't have a texture but a plain white material. Since it was in another layer I didn't see it while modelling but it did get exported and popped up in UrU. When I finally thought of checking the other layers... there it was covering my waveset. I deleted it and problem solved.

Just check and make sure

[Jojon]

Ok, maybe there's something in the stuff below that you don't already know, maybe not :7 :

Your "transpcurrent" is a texture record (I guess we should say "texture block"), denoted by the "TE:" preceding its name in the string box on the shading/material/texture tab.

Now, the texture record/block is to your water picture, what an object is to a mesh, i.e. it isn't the picture itself, but a link to the picture, along with some additional data, such as info on whether the image contains an alpha channel. The texture, used by the texture block, doesn't have to be a picture, for that matter - it could just as well be a pattern that is calculated at render time, otherwise known as procedural textures, but we (with pyPRP) have limited use for those.

So, clicking the buttons->material/texture button, which is the spotty button next to the material/shading one, will bring up the texture panel. Here you will find a list of all texture blocks used by the material -- these are the same texture blocks that you can pick in material/shading/texture and this is where you "put something in them".

Selecting one of the blocks ("transpcurrent" should be your ony one, I guess), a "texture type" menu popup button will appear. To tell Blender that you want to use a picture loaded from disk, pick "Image". Now two new panels will pop up; one with image options and one that lets you assign an image block (denoted by "IM:") to the texture block, as well as load a picture into said image block. (All defined image blocks are accessible from the UV/image editor for mapping [remember; texture and UV-map are two separate entities and in no way bound to eachother]).

Both texture blocks and image blocks are reuseable. (although I believe an animated texture layer will want a unique (single user) texture block)

This is how textures are defined for materials and what is used by current pyPRP versions. It is still possible to load a single texture from the UV/image editor and use the material's "TexFace"button, the way we used to have to, but this is a rather limited method, which does not allow us to blend texture layers. When using the material's texture "TexFace" should be off.

[Kierra]

Jojun, no extra layer, I even checked in the outliner panel.

Marcello, I'll have to try to figure that out after work

~Kia

[Marcello]

Please do I know what that mistake cost me! It was my #2 problem after the one to get a waveset to work in an Pahts shell (which wasn't easy!!). Those two cost me half of my time developing my shell!!

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Thanks for posting the file, Kierra.

Like Jojon said, you will need to create a "texture block" for the "transpcurrent" object in order to get the IPO curve to work.

What I don't understand is that this version of Teralee that you posted doesn't look like the version from which you've taken screenshots. In your pictures, the "transpcurrent" object does have a texture block (and hence, a MapInput tab). But this blend file doesn't have it, nor does it have the IPO curve. Did you post an older version?

[Kierra]

No, thats the right file. I've tried and re-tried a bunch of things to try and get it to work since those screenshots, so its possible that I forgot to do something or tried something different in the .blend file I saved and posted. Who knows *shrug*

Work sucked and my brain is fried for the night. Not even gonna try to do anything with it tonight or I'll just screw it up even more I'm sure

~Kia