Animated UV coords

#1 Animate the map.. in the sequence helper, enable the 'texture animation' checkbox.

EDIT:

if you are asking how to do it in max.. either animate the gizmo (easiet way) or keyframe the UVs..

I have not used this in a long time because it is not very efficient. It is much better to make an IFL and animate the texure.

#2 Could someone briefly describe how to go about creation and implementation of an ifl in torque? does torque provide special support for this kind of animation? i havent been able to find much information here about ifl animations.

#3 An IFL is an image file list. It is a text file with a list of images. Instead of loading a texture, you load the .ifl, which is basically a slideshow of the images listed in the file list.

You then check the checkbox in the exporter to turn it on, and export.

If you have max, you can take a look at this shape as an example.

There are also examples in the Tank pack.

note that IFLs are a 3dsmax thing.. how to set them up is covered in the 3dsmax docs. setup in other applications is dependent on how is was implemented in each app.

#4 One way that we do it in our exporter is to export a node from max who's XYZ position is translated unto UVW coordinates. When you animate the node the U'Vs animate.

Nice thing about that is you can use 3dsmax native keyframe editor and spline interpolation tools to animate UV'e subtly. I'm not sure whether you could get the same kind of control with torquescript or not. But thats pretty much the way the UV's are animated in our engine.

#5 If you want to have it slide endlessly, you can do this easily and pretty efficiently in TSE through the Materials system. You can even rotate and scale the UV's over time.

#6 Yeah thats the kind of thing I do, you can also synch the animated UV's to animated objects in the scene like an animated additive glow sprite that moves with the UV's.

so you can loft a mesh shape along a spline, the mesh can be auto uvmapped to follow the original spline path,when you animate the UV's and the texture appears to flow along the mesh in the direction the spline path was created. Then can assign a mesh to that path, or a node that you export that instances a game model to the nodes transforms. that way you can do a lot of neat dynamic looking graphics effects and animation cheaply and without much effort on the artists part. Particularly when you combine banking parametrers etc in the max follow controler. Great for nice little graphical touches that can bring your level to life.

#7 Yeah guys, this all sounds like what I'm trying to do, but it just doesn't seem to work.

I've tried all the following configurations:
I've checked 'enable' texture
I've checked 'force' texture
I've checked 'enable' decal
I've checked 'force' decal
I've animated the gizmos
I've animated the offsets
I've linked the gizmos to another object that controlls it's location (like AdrianTysoe method)

none of the above stuff works. actually, it works in max, but not in the ShowTool

am I missing something? maybee my .cfg file needs something?

#8 Here is a working example:

www.joemaruschak.com/animateUVs.zip