Flashing billboards

Just a mad thought here, but could you possibly use normal lights that blink on and off but arrange them like letters to make the necessary words.

Check your PM’s Gibbon, I’d like to give it a go and test it out. Shouldn’t take long, though I’ve got a couple finals projects due this week.

Sorry to pester on this, but any chance you could send a TGA version of Bill01noodleL.dds ? Seems the installer for nVidia’s 64 bit DDS plugin locks up my damn computer So can’t edit DDS files, only compress to dds with an external program. At least Milkshape doesn’t crap on itself in Win7 x64. Well … so far. Love when upgrading breaks more things than it fixes.

Sidenote: if you want to dig in yourself, you’d need to separate the 4 faces of the billboard’s glass into their own group in Milkshape, then add a new texture for that group and re-map those faces to the new texture. Then you could toss in the MaterialAnim node hierarchy.

Ok here ya go. Quick n dirty

I modified the original texture a little to reflect how you might want to re-do the texture to simulate the lights going out and not reflecting off the noodle cup. But I used a pic I found on the web as close as I could get the shape and angle, so hopefully you have the original lying around. The texture’s just a guide anyhow, as it’s only 512x512. Also just dumped the whole mat file into the cmp itself, but looking at my TACC ship, it shouldn’t need to be that way to animate. Wasn’t entirely sure which mats were actually being used where, so just left the originals and added my own for the one which is now animated.

SIDENOTE: If you properly make a transparent TGA in photoshop, you won’t need the Oc, Ot_name, Ot_flags nodes, and it can just be DcDtEc type. I figured you only wanted the letters to blink, so that’s the part I darkened. You may wish to redo the entire thing though for a clean version with proper glow simulation in the tga itself.

As it stands in the file, DcDtEcOcOt works well.
Nodes are:
[olist]* Dc (1,1,1)

• Dt_name
• Dt_flags (64,0)
• Ec (1,1,1)
• Oc (0.8, 0)
• Type[/olist]

You also might want to change texture orientation. I just matched the original, but that reads backwards unless flipped on vertical axis.
SIDENOTE 2: wasn’t paying attention when I renamed the mat in MS, so it’s Bill10 instead of 01 in the Milkshape file
You’ll also see why I said the texture will move .5 with this. It depends on the way you map the faces in Milkshape; I remapped the face to cover the entire texture, then scaled the mapping down by .5 on Y so it covers the top half of the texture only, like a window (which moves on Y in the MaterialAnim by .5).

I’m including:

• The MS3D file - so you can check the differences in grouping, and texture mapping (Hit “Ctrl + T” in Milksh!t)

• PSD for Photoshop - erm I guess as a template / guide (done in CS5, let me know if you want a version compatible with older Photoshop vers

• PotNoodle jpg - just in case yours went missing

• sign_anim_temp.tga - easy access to check out the “finished” texture.

LAST NOTE: the attached file is 7zip format, but had to rename to Zip to upload.
I could also upload my dinky little test system flmm format with the Billboard placed near your spawn. Just let me know.

Sorry to hear that, I haven’t run across it before. Are you using the dx9 hook with bloom and all that jazz?
I tried moving around my directional light to check the shadowing out but didn’t notice a difference with vanilla graphics.

Ah yes, thus far in my trials Et doesn’t work with Dt when doing animations. Something about trying to animate 2 textures at once if I recall the discussion here a while back. I think if you have a texture with alpha chan specifying where to apply glow you can use EcEtOcOt. Haven’t tried it yet, but by the looks using that in-game, some near combination should work.

What I am staring at right now, which works:
On the Bill10_Glow_Glass_Anim material try DcDtEcOcOt
Set Dc to 1,1,1
Set Ec to 1,1,1
Nodes are: Dc, Dt_name, Dt_flags, Ec, Oc, Type

That’s what I just tried and it doesn’t look like any shadows. A little earlier I was messing around with … um some other combination and saw the shadows you were talking about.

Gibbon wrote:
No i’m not, can’t stand all that bloom nonsense lol. No idea why this is happening. I tried adding the EcEt section and although i can see it now, then it won’t flash plus only half the texture is emissive…. Odd

Question. concerning those BB that face the dark side of your system, Why can you use little invisible lights to put in front of it so that it is visible, with out messing with the mat file stuff?

Fus

We also have custom BB in the UV, and altho they aren’t animated, we on some of them, had to put little system lights in front of them so that they would look right. That is what I meant by little invisible lights. I was just reading this string, and that is what occurred to me, because it was something we had to deal with.

If you have already tried this to help solve the problem and it didn’t work, then never mind.

Fus

Just thought I’d toss a vid up to show how this method looks in-game, and clarify to some of those wondering if this is a “sliding” type of animation. As you can see, it is not
Again, sorry for the crap texture re-do. Just wanted to give a semi-accurate implementation.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=25173778