Of gobos and TV snow effects

[Detonatress]

Can someone explain how to use snow effect gobo projections over TV screens (specifically the spytech screen bank), please?
http://imgur.com/cC01LKK

We want to put a bunch of lights to project snow over most of them (except the big one, that one's reserved for something else) but same time not get snow overlays on the main camera.

Does SFM allow RT camera to be used on gobo? I've looked for camera-to-gobo videos but I cannot find any, just Jimer Lins' video on texture projection. I do remember finding a video about this but cannot find it anymore.

Also, would it work if the RT camera is in another shot than the screens?
Or is it possible to somehow apply snow to one gobo/camera without messing with clip effects?

[Zappy]

I'm not sure what you mean, so I'll just say (hopefully) related and useful things instead.

- You can only have one RT camera per shot.
- The RT camera has to be in the same shot as where you want to use it.
- RT cameras don't support ambient occlusion (not related to your post, but it is noteworthy).
- RT cameras are baked onto an "_rt_camera" texture or something, which anything (models, map brushes, lights, particles, etcetera) can use.

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by Vintage:

I'm not sure what you mean, so I'll just say (hopefully) related and useful things instead.

- You can only have one RT camera per shot.
- The RT camera has to be in the same shot as where you want to use it.
- RT cameras don't support ambient occlusion (not related to your post, but it is noteworthy).
- RT cameras are baked onto an "_rt_camera" texture or something, which anything (models, map brushes, lights, particles, etcetera) can use.

So if all the small screens need snow effect and the big one has to display a message with a blinking cursor at the end, would the best thing to use be something like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPHk-5t50Cc

[Zappy]

Originally posted by Detonatress:

So if all the small screens need snow effect and the big one has to display a message with a blinking cursor at the end, would the best thing to use be something like this?

That depends. Do you need ambient occlusion? Do you need effect clips on the RT camera? Is it impossible to find an animated noisy texture for the screens? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, the answer is yes.

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by Vintage:

Originally posted by Detonatress:

So if all the small screens need snow effect and the big one has to display a message with a blinking cursor at the end, would the best thing to use be something like this?

That depends. Do you need ambient occlusion? Do you need effect clips on the RT camera? Is it impossible to find an animated noisy texture for the screens? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, the answer is yes.

The answer to 1st: no.
The answer to 2nd: yes
The answer to 3rd: nope. But no one has made any yet it seems.

So this means I'll have to make snow videos in vegas (and the animated cursor + text) and export them as two textures for use with gobos. This shouldn't be too difficult. The difficult part will fall on the one who will have to put a bunch of lights to fill those screens though... I wish I could avoid that, but I fail at texturing objects.

[Detonatress]

Didn't SFM have its own static effect though? I have a vague memory of some static being available in it, but I can't find it at all...

[Zappy]

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Didn't SFM have its own static effect though?

Yes it does, but it's an "effect", meaning it gets overlayed over the screen (like Jarate or the sniper rifle zoom scopes in Team Fortress 2), not (even) a texture (at all).

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by Vintage:

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Didn't SFM have its own static effect though?

Yes it does, but it's an "effect", meaning it gets overlayed over the screen (like Jarate or the sniper rifle zoom scopes in Team Fortress 2), not (even) a texture (at all).

Yes but if I would export it as a movie, it could then be used as an animated texture. However, all I can find is the spectating one, and I remember something more like the static seen on the screens in the comic, not the wavy static:
http://www.teamfortress.com/tf01_ring_of_fired/#f=28

Vegas seems to be pretty crap at making good static, it just adds vertical bands to it and looks overall messy. http://i.imgur.com/XJcQiMw.jpg
I'll have to find stock footage of static somewhere. Or record some if I can get one of my tvs to show static instead of black/blue.

[Zappy]

Why not add a grain effect clip?

[episoder]

tv_movies\mats\filmgrain\pgrain?!? a gorg texture. 40 megabytes of noise. :D you can put it a polygon in front of the camera that's recording with whatever alpha or effect you wanna use. like an input filter. or use it as animated detailtexture for a polygon overlay. with a basetexture for tranparency masking and a bit of detailblendmode. if you use it as projected texture itself you can't select what it projects more then that. you only have one texture to project. if you wanna do that you could project a light thru it. you need a alphatest material on a blind. note that it only generates noisy shadows. whatever effect you might do then. :)

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by Vintage:

Why not add a grain effect clip?

Yes, that was the effect I was looking for! Thank you! Now all I have to do is find a blueish-white place to record this over, and then it should be good to go as texture.

Originally posted by episoder:

tv_movies\mats\filmgrain\pgrain?!? a gorg texture. 40 megabytes of noise. :D you can put it a polygon in front of the camera that's recording with whatever alpha or effect you wanna use. like an input filter. or use it as animated detailtexture for a polygon overlay. with a basetexture for tranparency masking and a bit of detailblendmode. if you use it as projected texture itself you can't select what it projects more then that. you only have one texture to project. if you wanna do that you could project a light thru it. you need a alphatest material on a blind. note that it only generates noisy shadows. whatever effect you might do then. :)

I have no idea what half of what you said is. As a result, I understood to put a rectangle or something over the screens of the TVs and set the pgrain as a texture with overlay materials (but it will not look too good because the corners of the screens are round, and I don't even know if I could use it that way)

Here's pretty much how I'd want to use these screens, except in my case it would be just static and the middle one with text. I think in this case some green screens were used (and post-processing) since the camera does not change angles, but in my case the camera will definitely be changing angles.
https://youtu.be/VD6AM-9-eFQ?t=1m52s

[Zappy]

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Here's pretty much how I'd want to use these screens,

I don't know about the green-screen, but if you look at the fade-out, you see the corners of the videos. Clearly post-processing. Post-processing tends to do that stuff when fading.

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by Vintage:

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Here's pretty much how I'd want to use these screens,

I don't know about the green-screen, but if you look at the fade-out, you see the corners of the videos. Clearly post-processing. Post-processing tends to do that stuff when fading.

Yeah, that's why I wrote it in the brackets.

But the idea is to fill those tubes as well as possible with light gobos, because I'm not sure if I could somehow compress several animated textures and place them over the screen banks' texture. It would require cutting the corners of each video and it would also require overexposure of each video, since the banks will be colored much darker in SFM.

[episoder]

you want a lot of different screens? you could decompile the model. rip out aka copy paste the screen's polygons. then uv-unwrap them and put a material on every monitor. you could number them like a grid thing so you know which screen shows which picture or animation. or use a sort of random strategy to map them to a couple of less materials with somewhat similar fast animated textures that you might pack into one file and place with $basetexturetransform. those could do 12 screens with 3 animated textures to cycle. fill the rest with garbage. that might even render a lil faster then lighting them all.

and... you could perhaps make/rebake the whole box or just the screen portions to use a solid but translucent material to not cast shadows and put a light behind it to cast some animated screen light into the room. you can still use the trick with the blind using alphatest stencil material to shade the light cast with more randomness or put the screen stencil self on it. you could also make the monitors $nocull so you could shoot them with a monitor camera from backwards thru the box. you gotta set that up whatever and how you wanna record thru that box. you gotta make alphatest materials for the screens too to not block light itself. so effectively that way you'd record and project all the screen's colors if you'd put the _rt_camera into the lightgobo. i did that already. the "holo" trick http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=426822893. might be a lil tricky to spread that light. but i'm sure you'll find a correct frustum for all the parts to look good. :)

[Detonatress]

There are 2 problems here:
1 - I fail at texturing, in spite of working in Maya for several years, and as far as I know it only supports GIFs, as I once made something like that for school. I have nearly zero experience with Blender, so I don't know if I can put animated textures over them in Blender.

2 - I have to give the task of rendering/scene building this part to another group member, and I don't want to make it too complicated for him.


EDIT: Hmm, seems like VTFedit also will turn the sequences into GIF-like stuff. I hope it can hold the quality (even though it will be just snow).

Can Blender import mdl stuff? Or do I have to convert them to blender-supported formats?

[Zappy]

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Can Blender import mdl stuff?

No.

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Or do I have to convert them to blender-supported formats?

Yes.