What's the best way of having an animation loop with transparency in my wallpaper?

[Ren]

I have a looping animation that I want to use on my wallpaper. I want to have it as a layer so I can add other things as well, instead of just having a video-wallpaper.

• I can't have it as a gif as it's too large and WE just spits out an error.
  
• I can't have it as an mp4 because mp4 doesn't have transparency
  
• I'm not sure if webm's can be used as layers, I think they might be for "video-wallpaper" only. Even if I could use a webm file, webm seems to introduce white pixel artifacts around the transparent edges so I'd rather find something else.

[Biohazard]

If you render the transparent area with a high-contrast color and create a layer from an mp4, you can use the "color key" effect on it which is basically a green screen.

Webm's can't be used as layers in scene files right now since this isn't supported on all Windows versions and hardware and the Windows media system likely doesn't support transparency for them anyway, it doesn't support transparency for any video format as far as we know. If the GIF is so large that it doesn't even import, it wouldn't really be suitable for background playback in the end, this is usually the case when a video is converted to a GIF. So using a video texture would really be the best way and the green screen method allows you to add transparency since Microsoft unfortunately neglected that.

[Ren]

Oh right, I forgot to mention color keying.
Yeah it's the only one that gives the result I want. It's not the best solution, since the green bleeds in no matter what keying settings I use. Best I can do is to use it twice but even then it's still not great.
I'll try making the animation have binary-transparency instead of having pixels of varying transparency, so the green will bleed in less I hope.

Thanks for all the info

[butcho]

Color keying is ok but you will never achive the same quality that you get with an image format with transparency. If you're something like a quality junkie like I am I would suggest splitting huge animations in two or more parts, adding them as seperate image sequences and stitching them back together in Wallpaper Engine. Works great and the result is better than color keying, especially around the edges of the animation.

If you stay under 1.024 px in height or width for your image sequence chances are high that you can import it without any problems. Did that like a million times, works really good.

[Ren]

Originally posted by butcho:

Color keying is ok but you will never achive the same quality that you get with an image format with transparency. If you're something like a quality junkie like I am I would suggest splitting huge animations in two or more parts, adding them as seperate image sequences and stitching them back together in Wallpaper Engine. Works great and the result is better than color keying, especially around the edges of the animation.

If you stay under 1.024 px in height or width for your image sequence chances are high that you can import it without any problems. Did that like a million times, works really good.

Thank you. I've changed the size to 1024 px and now I can import the gif I want. However the gif is having trouble with transparency- only one frame (starting frame) is transparent.

[butcho]

GIF is a pretty bad for animations and comes with some restrictions. It's way better if you export your gif as a sequence of images, like png for example, and import the image sequence into WPE instead of the crappy gif format.

[Capt.Luke]

mp4 does have transparency
add your mp4 file as a video texture in WPE and you can set the blend to whatever you want and/or you can also adjust the opacity

adding transparency to a video texture is as ez as for a image

you can also get way better quality then with a gif file with less size and memory use

[butcho]

Of course it works with mp4, depends on the level of quality you try to achieve whether to use image or video textures. ^^

[Ren]

Originally posted by butcho:

GIF is a pretty bad for animations and comes with some restrictions. It's way better if you export your gif as a sequence of images, like png for example, and import the image sequence into WPE instead of the crappy gif format.

Is there a quick way of doing this? I know animated pngs arent supported. The animation I want is quite short (60~ frames) but will I have to put them all into WE individually?

[Bruhsty]

Select all frames > drag and drop inside of the editor = image sequence

[Ren]

oh i see, i didnt know you could do that. thank you

[butcho]

How should you know, I guess it's not even documented in the WPE wiki and I read comments here over the years where the developers didn't recommend it to people because of performance reasons. Don't know what kind of grudge they have against image sequences but as long as you don't add 10-20 really huge sequences this should not blow your gpu to pieces but be aware that you fill up your video ram pretty fast with big image sequences.

Anyway...here are some more hints you might find helpful: adding the suffix _t and an amount of milliseconds to the filename will pause the sequence at that frame like "mysequence_frame10_t10000.png" will pause the sequence on that frame for 10 seconds.

The frame duration you set on import is also important to make the images run smooth. If you aim for 30 fps I would recommend a frame duration between 0.03 and 0.06 seconds max. Everything above, like the standard 0.25 seconds is way to much. It makes the animation look like some kind of flip book. ^^

Hope this helps somehow and happy wallpapering.