Maya tutorial: An animated texture

 To make animated backgrounds or textures could become very frustrating if you don’t know what formats of the image sequence Maya is supporting. It is not just in Maya where you can find this kind of problem with image sequences. For example Adobe Premiere has very similar difficulties when the names and numbering of images are not properly done. So make sure your image sequence name is prepared properly before it is used in Maya or Premiere.

 

Maya tutorial: An animated texture

In order to use a sequence of image files to create an animation, the file name must be expressed in one of the following three formats:

name.#.ext
name.ext.#
name.#

where name is the base name of the file; # is the frame number (with or without leading 0s), ext is the file extension of the file.

To use a C to create an animated file texture, the file extensions must be separated from the basename and, or the extension by periods.

For example, the following works:
test.1.iff
test.0001.iff
test.1
test.0001
test.iff.1
test.iff.0001

But the following would not work:
test1

The frame padding means how many zeros you will have in the name numbering of the picture when rendered and saved on your hard disk. If you set the value of the frame padding on 3, your name will have 3 zero points and look like this:

Test_001.tga

note: TGA format is the most popular to use in the film industry.

Once you have got your sequence of image files ready, you can start to animate the texture.

Step 1:

Create the polygon cube. Set the Scale values to 5; 3.5; 5

Step 2:

Open the Multilister Window>Rendering editors>Multilister and select Edit>Create new material. In the new tab select Lambert. Double click on the new material you have just made (should already be labelled lambert2) and the attributes for that material should appear.

Click on the checker attribute button next to color.

Step 3:

Click on the File button.

A texture file note should now be created.

Step 4:

Click on the file browser button and find the first image of your sequence and hit ok. Then tick the box Use Image Sequence. If the format and names of your images are right, Maya should create an expression connection for you and the box Image Number should turn violet in color.

Step 5:

Now you can simply drag and drop material onto your modified cube using the middle mouse button. Hit the play button and your sequence of image files should play onto your object.

You can use this method, for example, to achieve a TV effect or animate backgrounds in your scene. This is also a very smart way to make a water flow effect without the use of dynamics particles.

Click on the picture to get a movie.