IFL's and maya
by Kasey McIntosh · in Artist Corner · 11/06/2007 (1:09 pm) · 4 replies
O.K, heres the issue, I got my IFL to work in maya, but when I export it the animation don't show in Show tool pro. What am i doing wrong. I exported a sequence, but didn't do anything with the shape.
About the author
#2
11/13/2007 (11:35 am)
Heres how i loaded the IFL. I pened the attributes property panel for a Lambert, clicked the box for the color slider, and chose movie. It shows up in show tool, but dosent play. The sequence exports, and the sequence has the enable IFL on.
#3
11/13/2007 (11:46 am)
Sounds like your loading them into maya as a series of images, this is incorrect. You should be assigning the.IFL file to the surface.
#4
My example ..... created a text file named: ropeB.ifl ... inside the file, the following lines are added:
Obviously, you will need all of the textures listed above in the same folder as the .IFL file. This will 'scroll' the texture by swapping out 0 for 1, 1 for 2..., 7 for 0.
So instead of a movie file, you will need a series of images. Either export out your movie file to an image sequence or if it is already a texture, the easiest way to create the 'scroll' in Photoshop is to FILTER > OFFSET your image a specific number of pixels, multiplied by the amount of textures you want.
Example: If you have a 256x256 texture, and you want a series of 8 images (like my ropeB example), you would offset your image 32 pixels, then save it out and repeat. By default, the images will swap every frame, so you will have to judge your speed by that. You can tell the IFL file how many frames you want each texture to play as well, as in the following example:
In this case, 0 would play for 8 frames, 1 for 4 frames, 2 for only 1 frame (not indicated), etc etc. So if you wanted to uniformly slow down the texture, you could do one of two things: A) add frame numbers after the image references as above, or B)save out more image files (in the rope example, offset by 4 pixels and save 16 images for a slower texture. The advantage to 'A' is less texture memory, but if you try to slow it too much, it will loop choppy.
Think of uniform for flowing rivers, and non-uniform for a slideshow from a projector. There are TONS of uses for IFLs.
Hope that helps, and if I didn't explain correctly, somebody please correct me. Gotta Run!
11/13/2007 (4:01 pm)
Mr. Bloodworth is right ... you need to assign the IFL (it a text file named the same as your texture, with the .IFL extention).My example ..... created a text file named: ropeB.ifl ... inside the file, the following lines are added:
ropeB_0.jpg ropeB_1.jpg ropeB_2.jpg ropeB_3.jpg ropeB_4.jpg ropeB_5.jpg ropeB_6.jpg ropeB_7.jpg
Obviously, you will need all of the textures listed above in the same folder as the .IFL file. This will 'scroll' the texture by swapping out 0 for 1, 1 for 2..., 7 for 0.
So instead of a movie file, you will need a series of images. Either export out your movie file to an image sequence or if it is already a texture, the easiest way to create the 'scroll' in Photoshop is to FILTER > OFFSET your image a specific number of pixels, multiplied by the amount of textures you want.
Example: If you have a 256x256 texture, and you want a series of 8 images (like my ropeB example), you would offset your image 32 pixels, then save it out and repeat. By default, the images will swap every frame, so you will have to judge your speed by that. You can tell the IFL file how many frames you want each texture to play as well, as in the following example:
ropeB_0.jpg 8 ropeB_1.jpg 4 ropeB_2.jpg ropeB_3.jpg 4 ropeB_4.jpg 6 ropeB_5.jpg 7 ropeB_6.jpg 3 ropeB_7.jpg
In this case, 0 would play for 8 frames, 1 for 4 frames, 2 for only 1 frame (not indicated), etc etc. So if you wanted to uniformly slow down the texture, you could do one of two things: A) add frame numbers after the image references as above, or B)save out more image files (in the rope example, offset by 4 pixels and save 16 images for a slower texture. The advantage to 'A' is less texture memory, but if you try to slow it too much, it will loop choppy.
Think of uniform for flowing rivers, and non-uniform for a slideshow from a projector. There are TONS of uses for IFLs.
Hope that helps, and if I didn't explain correctly, somebody please correct me. Gotta Run!
Torque Owner Woody
Secondly, if you have done the IFL correctly, make sure that (in the sequence node) you 'Enable IFL' by turning it on.
Hope that helps... if not, let me know.