Advanced : Moving textures

[Fluid Script Studios]

Hey everyone,

I'm doing some tests with textures, in particular "Sky cards" which are basically 2D flat screens with a texture of a sky over it, like so : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=853096611

My question is however, is it possible to make a sky card with a moving image (a video basically)? Sort of like how monitors display moving images, is it possible? Has anyone ever tried it? If so how would you go about doing it.

Answered :
Here is the result
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ8GDLAdNF8

Personal thoughts. As what Marco Skoll said, the limitations are pretty annoying. The fact that they don't exactly loop exactly where you want them is a huge hindrance. The only solution...or rather a bandaid is to just make the image sequence longer (The one i used was initially 4 seconds long, 112 frames.

Despite this, i think it looks amazing. What do you guys think?

[Pte Jack]

Not sure is skytextures will use animated VTFs, but if they do, then that is the ticket you need.

[Marco Skoll]

Source does support animated materials if you really want, but in SFM, I find them more of a hassle than actually useful.

The user only gets only limited control over them (while you can set their framerate, you cannot sync their frames to the scene's frames. A given scene frame will not necessarily have the same texture frame displayed every time), they have to be a looping cycle, and their filesizes can be massive for a large texture with lots of frames. (Which presents a real problem, given SFM's memory limits).

Personally, I would only normally use such materials for very simple or small scene details. It's one thing for the simple flash of an Ubercharged Heavy or an unimportant computer screen that I'm not actually expecting the viewer to take in, but for a sky it's likely to cause you problems.

For a moving sky, I'd either use a green-screen and composite it in post processing, or cheat it by actually moving the sky-card.

[episoder]

skycards? are basicly just polygons in the 3d skybox. whether unlit or vertexlit you should be able to animate it with proxies. yes.

[Fluid Script Studios]

Thanks for the info so far guys.

So i dug a bit deeper, and there is a mechanism i don't understand yet.

I opened a texture file for an animated screen monitor. There are two components (as far as i know) to making the animated texture, which is the VMT file (the script that tells the texture what to do) and the VTF file, which is the actual texture.

In the VMT file, the script states the following :
------------------------
"vertexlitGeneric"

{
"$baseTexture" "models\props_tech\monitor_one"
"$selfillum" 1
"Proxies"
{
"AnimatedTexture"
{
"animatedTextureVar" "$basetexture"
"animatedTextureFrameNumVar" "$frame"
"animatedTextureFrameRate" "30"
}
}
}
------------------------

This script only seems to tell how the texture is to be animated.

The thing i am missing is the how the VTF file is supposed to be recognized as a multi-image texture.
Here are some screenshots to explain what i mean:
http://imgur.com/a/rufWs

So anyone know how to change it so that the VTF file is, say for example, a 4 frame texture instead of a 1 frame texture?

[Pte Jack]

When you create your VTF, you create it the same as you would an animated gif. Each layer is different (or a frame). When you save your VTF you tell whatever program you're using that the VTF is an animated VTF and it will save the VTF in Frames.

[Pte Jack]

I do an animated VTF in this video... Just skip through it...

https://youtu.be/eCTGQRAKTiw

[Fluid Script Studios]

Thank you! That's the ticket ;)

Thanks for the help guys.

I'm gonna see if i can get it working in SFM, if i don't ill come back.

[Pte Jack]

Originally posted by TheNCourt:

I'm gonna see if i can get it working in SFM, if i don't ill come back.

What, ( you have 3 choices)
1) thrown the computer through the window of a 50 story building and given up?,
2) Walked out and thrown yourself in front of a fast moving swan?
3) Got it to work!

Doh, missed the Ill part!


lol

[Fluid Script Studios]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

Originally posted by TheNCourt:

I'm gonna see if i can get it working in SFM, if i don't ill come back.

What, ( you have 3 choices)
1) thrown the computer through the window of a 50 story building and given up?,
2) Walked out and thrown yourself in front of a fast moving swan?
3) Got it to work!

Doh, missed the I'll part!


lol

If i don't come back... you'll know why...

shifty eye's the swan

[Fluid Script Studios]

Hey guys, i just thought i'd post to show you the results of what i made as i think it came out pretty dope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ8GDLAdNF8

Basically everything Marco said were the biggest issues actually trying to use this thing it has a huge file size (4 second animation, slowed down to 7 seconds, via using 18 fps instead of 30, 150 MB file, image sequence sizes are 1920x1080)

[Pte Jack]

Yeah, that's pretty much how I thought it might turn out.... Best thing for changing sky boxes is to Chromachrome (green screen) and add it post using a program like aftereffects or something. Animated VTFs are extremely hard to control. They're limited to how many frames you give them as well before they loop.

[Fluid Script Studios]

My biggest problem with chromakey is that you don't get the consistent blur that you can attain from doing it straight from the program¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You can also do lighting to the sky to make it fit in with the scene (as well as using fog to meld the ground with the bottom of the skycard.


Also you can move the card to get the best perspective in sfm (i find that tilting the model toward the camera 50 - 90 ish degrees makes it look like its the sky above, without distorting the image too much.) Something not easily done in post.


but of course, there's always a catch It's either

1) create longer files to lessen inconsistent playback, at the cost of having huge texture file sizes... and risk having SFM crash.

2) leave them short, at the cost of having inconsistent playback. (makes it so that you'd have to do cuts in post...which means animating gets more difficult.)

3) chromakey, but lose all the perks of doing it all in one program.

[Marco Skoll]

Originally posted by TheNCourt:

Basically everything Marco said were the biggest issues actually trying to use this thing

I am a font of occasional and specific wisdom.

I did expect it to be a pain in the butt, but it does look pretty good though.

It's a shame that SFM doesn't support actual video files, but I think that's only available in the Portal 2 version of the engine. (Given that, to my "stupid o'clock" recollection, Valve's games almost never use cut-away cut-scenes).

I guess the alternative is to do clouds and such with particles, but that might take some quite complex animation and particle editing to get a really great look.

[Pte Jack]

Yeah, thought about particles to, but then you lose shadows and they are a pain in the butt to actually generate and have move the way you want.

[Pipann]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

I do an animated VTF in this video... Just skip through it...

https://youtu.be/eCTGQRAKTiw

I've done scrolling textures before, but I've wondered how framed ones worked. Thanks for the video!