• Maxon Cinema 4D

  Looping noise on materials (animation vs. loop period)

  Posted by Olaf Gillot on February 10, 2016 at 10:44 pm

  Hey there,

  I’ve recently started messing around with animated noise to get a star surface effect (like what you see in a time lapse of the sun etc.) I’m doing good so far, and it looks neat. Only problem I have is that I’m planning to make a render (512 x 512 pixels) and basically turn it into a sprite sheet/square video which will be put in Unreal Engine 4. Since I do not want to have a 5GB video file compressed down into my little game I wanted to have the noise loop in a video (around) 10 to 20 seconds long, problem is. I can’t get the speed right.

  If I set the animation speed to 0.1 it looks really nice, but then it won’t loop in 300 frames (10 seconds 30 FPS). So I set the loop period to 10, but even with animation speed at 0.1 it won’t loop, only way to fix it is to set it at animation speed 1 (and keeping loop period at 10 seconds) but that obviously makes the speed way too fast again, and the only fix so far I’ve found is to make the video a whopping 200 seconds long, which is far from ideal in size terms even compressed and at an acceptable resolution.

  I’ve googled my way around on this problem, and the only posts I can see are people saying “I’ll mess around with this”. And that’s something I’ve done, and the conclusion was “Make the video longer” which isn’t an option.

  I hope you guys have an idea how to make my material loop neatly in around 10 seconds, but keeping the slow animation I want it to have.

  Thanks in advance,

  Olaf Gillot

  Brian Jones replied 10 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Brian Jones

  February 11, 2016 at 5:03 pm

  the help says “This setting is available for almost all types of noise, with the exception of Electric, Gaseous, Random and Wavy Turbulence, and will loop the noise in accordance with the time in seconds defined (Animation Speed) must not be set to 0). A value of 0 will turn this effect off. Note that, internally, the animation speed can then be adjusted accordingly and therefore change.”

  So, if you are not using one of those un-loopable noises it should work. Loop period is seconds but it’s really precise 0 – 300 frames is not 300 frames, it’s 301 frames and that does make a tiny difference (if it’s a tiny jump you are seeing) Loop period doesn’t have to be an integer so it can be adjusted. Animation speed will be changed internally to make it loop so some adjustments won’t seem to work (particularly at low speeds). Other than that, are you using Movement – that will break this.

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up