OTOY Forums

I have to do a render of same object with a ton of different textures.
A logical solution would be to make a sequence of textures and render it as animation.
Is it somehow possible to use texture sequence?

if you're host app supports this and you have an octane plugin for it, it should be simple not ?

Radiance

Guess this thread should be moved to Blender plugin forum then.

Made a test scene with single material, that has texture sequence. After exporting the scene I have same material without a texture at all. (So that's why i thought I just have to connect all the textures manually inside Octane and asked about sequence)
If I connect the texture manually, when I reexport I have two materials now. One is automatically named as texture filename (and has no texture) and used instead of previous one. And another is previously manually created with texture but the material not actually used in the scene. After some more of reexporting I get more weird results but texture frame is not changing whatever I do.

Hey,

I'm afraid i can't help you much with this, i've never used texture sequences in blender.
i'll move this topic into the blender forum, maybe some more seasoned blender users can help.

Radiance

Trying to get it working for some more I found that export script is sort of passing the texture in *.mtl file (map_Kd filename.jpg) but it is not loaded into Octane.
If I set "R" option when exporting, the texture gets loaded but all the materials get reset. And still only the first frame of texture sequence gets there.

Thats right because the image with the material is saved in the ocs file.
To change it in blender will have no effect after you create a new scene in Octane.
Maybe it gives a option in Blender to bake the material (ambient color) to a new texture file.
This new texture file should have every frame the same name so that Octane can load the changed texture.
In the Softimage exporter i wrote, i search for the bake property in the mesh and if any exists, i render it before i export the mesh.
So i have every frame a other texture with the same name.
But this must make the exporter.

You can see the effecte here:
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/13538683[/vimeo]

face

face wrote:Maybe it gives a option in Blender to bake the material (ambient color) to a new texture file.
This new texture file should have every frame the same name so that Octane can load the changed texture.
In the Softimage exporter i wrote, i search for the bake property in the mesh and if any exists, i render it before i export the mesh.
So i have every frame a other texture with the same name.
But this must make the exporter.

Good idea!

But it shouldn't be a problem for Python just to to copy current frame textures under the same file names, so they can be manually attached in Octane.
I know nothing about blender API yet though.

kivig wrote:Good idea!

But it shouldn't be a problem for Python just to to copy current frame textures under the same file names, so they can be manually attached in Octane.
I know nothing about blender API yet though.

Ok, thats would be a faster solution
But the plus for baking is, that you can use more than one uv-map, you can animate the position of every uv-map, you can manipulte the uv-values (if blender it supports), you can use animated procedurals and you can use vertex maps like the video (if Blender can bake them). All this you can use because all textures will be bake into a single texture that you can use in Octane.
I don´t know which uv-map the script use, but i think it use the first one if more then one exists.

face

face wrote:Ok, thats would be a faster solution
But the plus for baking is, that you can use more than one uv-map, you can animate the position of every uv-map, you can manipulte the uv-values (if blender it supports), you can use animated procedurals and you can use vertex maps like the video (if Blender can bake them). All this you can use because all textures will be bake into a single texture that you can use in Octane.
I don´t know which uv-map the script use, but i think it use the first one if more then one exists.

face

You are right again

It'd be a shame to loose texture mixing, plug-ins etc.
Ideally there could be a switch between baking and copying the first found texture.

Though I'd be happy to see anything that works

I am not sure that I have understood well everithing about this topic, but I have a question that sounds more or less related to this topic. It 's not actually about animating textures, but rather animating materials properties :

As the upcoming version will have emitting materials, I wonder it it will be possible to animate the color or the intensity of lights : in Blender it is made by using IPO curves, but I don't think that these curves will be usable in Octane.