animated decals

[svetlik]

How can you make a decal slide over the surface of a model? I've tried animating the translate x and y in the decals section under the choreography but it won't budge. Any help please.

[John Bigboote]

Seeing as A:M is not a typical UV type program where this would be an easy offset... I would say you would need to use an animated image sequence, animate your image moving from where it needs to start over to where it needs to end over the number of frames it needs to have...use an alpha channel... and in A:M apply the decal where it needs to be. SHOULD work--- Good luck.

[robcat2075]

I have an example PRJ that moves a projection map across the surface of an object.

 

Look in post # 8

[John Bigboote]

Uh-oh... I may have said 'it can't be done' and once again Robcat chimes in with proof that it can... you should start a series of these!

[robcat2075]

It is interesting that you CAN keyframe values for X and Y for a decal, although it has no effect.

 

It's not something that has ever been a known feature of A:M so I'm not calling it a bug yet.

 

Svetlik... if you could describe your particular case more we could possibly ascertain a best solution.

[NancyGormezano]

How can you make a decal slide over the surface of a model? I've tried animating the translate x and y in the decals section under the choreography but it won't budge.

 

 

 

You can animate the image for the decal with the repeat count

 

decal was applied with cylindrical map, the repeat count was 2 x 2 to start, and 3 x 2 at end

 

EDIT: I had seamless turned ON, which is why screen cap looks different than rendered movie. "Seamless" prop can also be animated - but is just ON/OFF

2to3repeat0.mov

Edited May 12, 2015 by NancyGormezano

[NancyGormezano]

In this example - I animated a PLANAR map applied decal's repeat count from 1 x 1, to 3 x 1 with seamless turned on

1to3repeaPlanar0.mov

[Rodney]

Thanks for that Nancy, you've actually had some success where I didn't before.

I'll add that we can get some cropping and zoom effects on those tiled images/sequences by using floating point (decimal) entries in the repeat settings.

The sweet spot for most images will be just before the image is repeated.

Negative numbers can also be used to invert the image/tiles.

 

If an origin point could be added to the settings that would open up a whole lot more possibilities (animated sprite sheets etc.).

Short of that however a similar result can be obtained by using a different frame from an image sequence (via timing setting) to control the origin.

In other words, the sequence would be animated to alter where the upper left corner of the image is located. Setting the timing to the correct frame would establish that origin on the decal/patch image, and the repeat setting would then be used to refine further or to duplicate.

 

As for animating a decal... you should check out Marcos (Xtaz) Rezende's tutorial on using smartskin/poses to animate decals.

 

Edit: Hmmm... Marcos's tutorial appears to be attached to the post but comes up as unavailable.