Animated textures: What support is there for this?

Support Materials and Textures
1

I can’t find any decent documentation so I’ll ask about it here

I mostly do 2D traditional animation, so I’m trying to figure out how to integrate it smoothly into Blender. One option I’m considering is using video files as textures on planes and other objects (it’s not necessarily the best option but it’s a flexible one–it lets me rough out the 2D first and then do the 3D later, and it gives me the ability to update my 2D render)

I’ve run into a few problems right off the bat.

  • There is apparently no support in the 3D viewport for animated textures. Scrubbing the timeline will not show the texture refresh (even though the texture tab acknowledges that I am using a video texture and even displays which frame of the video should currently be displaying
  • There is no refresh in the image/UV viewer window either. Although it has a scrubbing timeline, it does nothing.
  • Maybe this is a more general texture issue, but I can’t seem to make generated texture mapping show up in the 3D viewport. That’s a lesser problems since I usually use UV mapping, but it is odd.
  • Paint does not work on animated textures

I’ve halted for now to work on other things, but I am curious just what, exactly, Blender can support in the realm of animated textures. It clearly isn’t completely limited; the animation works just fine in the final render, but there isn’t any preview, which is a problem, and there isn’t any way to tweak the 2D render in Blender, which is inconvenient.

It would also be useful if I could pull a render from one scene and use it as a texture in another scene, but it’s unclear how that would work. I just think it would be nice to have in scenes where I want to use an elaborate cutout animation, and I want the 2D result to interact with the lighting in the scene, but I don’t want the problems and computational overhead that come with all of the component pieces interacting with each other when they could collectively be rendered shadeless just fine.

I know blender has never been very supportive of 2D, but it seems to have everything it needs but the tools.

2

Ah neat work in that thread, though it’s actually not far from anything I’ve done myself already. Lately I’ve been trying to swing more towards traditional animation, which is much more flexible and dynamic than cutout and has much less overhead than 3D, but the best I’ve seen in blender was a nifty (albeit limited) grease pencil demo. Doing anything frame-by-frame is a ridiculous hassle at the present, the amount of overhead labor it takes to take one 2D image and turn it into a different 2D image is obscene.

3
  • There is apparently no support in the 3D viewport for animated textures. Scrubbing the timeline will not show the texture refresh (even though the texture tab acknowledges that I am using a video texture and even displays which frame of the video should currently be displaying

The viewport does show animated textures. Did you enable the texture Auto refresh option.
The viewport shows UV mapped image textures so that includes both image sequences and movie formats

4

I had actually, it didn’t seems to do anything.
I was using the iMacs at school if that makes a difference.

5

I know what you’re talking about. I came from Anime Studio, which has much better support for this sort of workflow. (On the other hand, Blender is more flexible, more powerful, and has better lighting – especially with Cycles.)

I wrote a Windows application called BISE (Blender Image Sequence Editor) which works around some of Blender’s animated texture limitations. If you use that in combination with an add-in I wrote, Import Imageseq As Plane, you can basically tweak your character’s 2D animation in BISE then have Blender show the proper images on the proper frames.

There’s a lot more software that I wrote – mostly related to stereoscopic rendering in Blender – but you can find the info about BISE in part 5 of these articles: http://3d.simplecarnival.com/stereoscopic-blender-tools/

6

I’m actually coming from using ToonBoom, which is what a lot of independent traditional animators use (John Kricfalusi, Nick Cross) because it is similar to Flash but uses the conventions of traditional animation (peg boards, x-sheets, etc) and is extremely flexible for 2D work, much much more so than Blender (which is probably more technically flexible as a platform, but there is absolutely no way you can do what takes minutes in ToonBoom without going through insane hoops and possibly scripting new features, and definitely not without using external software). Blender also is missing many of the tools that make cutout animation practical in AfterEffects (eg the puppet warp tool, which automatically generates an appropriate deform mesh and makes it streamlined to add control points). Blender for all its potential flexibility does not give amateur artists the ability to have an idea and make it happen right away.

7

Yep, you’re correct. Blender isn’t optimized for the kind of workflow you’re describing. I’m a big believer in using the best tool for the job, and it doesn’t sound like Blender will suit your particular needs.