Flashing billboards
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Here’s an idea. Trying to figure out how to do a flashing billboard concept. I have a billboard, a standard texture and an emissive one. I want it so every two seconds they alternate. Think of a flashing neon sign and you get the idea.
I know something similar is already in FL, just thinking would would be needed to add to the texture file or cmp file to make this happen… Thoughts.
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Check here first.
If you can get that to work (crack open the file he mentions: \DATA\BASES\RHEINLAND\rh_01_bizmark_cityscape.cmp for reference).
Particularly the:
MaterialAnim || banner1021028174103 and
Material library || banner1021028174103 nodes.I don’t think you can actually animate the Ec values of a material. In this one Ec is set to 0.8 , 0.8 , 0.8 which provides a pretty heavy glow, being almost full white values. But using this type of anim should allow you to darken your base Dt texture to give an appearance of going dark, which should achieve the same thing.
Good luck. Post some vid footage for slobber factor afterwards
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Sorry for my english, i think i can’t clarify the way with this english skill level. I use english only in few english forums, and it’s not my native language.
You can make animate with texture which only have Ec node, like DtDcEc. But you cannot use DtDcEtEc.
And in my previous post: the MAKeys use to control how to move texture (in percentage), and MADeltas control how long the texture display(in secs). Hope now you can understand what i mean there.
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If you only want to display two texture (i mean one texture but different position, there looks no way to display multi-texture in single face.), you need have 3 MADeltas nodes. like this:
MADeltas 0.000000 // This is a mistake so don't display this forever. 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 2.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 2.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 -
What i’m finding confusing is this, written by LS,
“Forgot to add this, under Cmpnd, you have to add a second MaterialAnim node.
Build it the same way as the one above with one single difference. The MAFlags should be 64 in this one.”What’s this all about?
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Gibbon wrote:
What i’m finding confusing is this, written by LS,“Forgot to add this, under Cmpnd, you have to add a second MaterialAnim node.
Build it the same way as the one above with one single difference. The MAFlags should be 64 in this one.”What’s this all about?
I did’t touch the Cmpnd any bit, but it still works good. So you may try to make MaterialAnim without bother with the Cmpnd.
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Any luck mate? Gotta remember to re-map the face of your billboard to suit your new texture before the frame type anim will be of any use.
Just thought I’d toss that out there in case it was overlooked
Then the X movement is an easy 50% and no Y to worry about.
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Its a flag, I just never got around to decoding them. Its a bit-wise flag, in that case it’s bit 6 (7th bit in an 8 bit number, numbered 0 to 7). You will see alot of them used for textures as well. The reason for 2 MA entries is that I was using the way DA made the animations which use 2 entries normally for simple anims.
You can look at the mesh in most cities to get the MA codes you need, simply do the positioning change as listed above (-25% and 25%). There is another anim type available though, the ones used for weapon FX. You may want to try that since it is frame based, meaning you can create a tiled texture and switch between the two real slow. Just remember that the texture must be absolutely square to animate (bug in DX anim textures, never fixed by MS since it’s still in DX 11).
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Hmmm, you guys are showing me moving textures and sliding textures, all very nice for those that want that, but all i’m after is a simple on/off texture.
Here’s an example of what i’m looking for, the first few seconds of the video actually covers it perfectly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN2N2SMrNd0
So texture one would be quite a dark texture, maybe just black and white, second texture the same but in colour and bright to simulate the neon sign on/off process
This is my sign so far,
I’m assuming i’d have to make one texture with both textures included, the black and white one and the colour one as say the one on manhattan that scrolls right to left.
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Aye, that’s what I was attempting to show. Unfortunately most times what’s in my head translates poorly to the page ;-(
The gif in my above post shows:
[olist]* Resizing the original texture contents to half on one axis- Pasting a copy into the empty half.
- Either darkening that half’s color to near black, or lowering its opacity to near 0% (since Ec is always 0.8 throughout the animation)
- Remapping the billboard’s face by scaling it on the same axis by 50% also
- Then setting up your frame animation off that[/olist]
The end result is the last two shown in the gif (though it is the mapping which animates, so it will appear in the same spot on the billboard).
2nd frame results in the texture “going dark”, then repeating.
Could also toss more frames in to simulate flicker, adjusting frame display duration.
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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.
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@ Mini_Me
Finally got round to this. I’ve uploaded it here. When you look at the texture, it’s only the section where the ad is that needs to flash, around 2 or 3 seconds on/off repeated. Once i see how this is done then obviously i can do all the others i need to do, 50+ lol
Appreciate the assist. -
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.
