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Texture tag: Animation in “Offset V” property doesn’t render properly
Hello there,
Hoping someone out there might be able to help me out here…
I’ve modeled a moebius strip/ring (by sweeping a rectangle around a circle, setting End Rotation to 180, making editable, and fixing the twisted end-polygons with the Bridge tool) and I’ve made a material to apply to it.
The material has a stony/rocky texture, and what I’d like to do is give the illusion that the ring is rotating WITHOUT rotating the geometry (that would break the optical illusion I’m trying to achieve). I was thinking that animating the Offset V property in the texture tag would do the trick.
In the viewport, it works great! It plays back fine and gives me the desired effect. But at render time, the texture remains static, no matter how I define or animate the Offset V property. I’ve tried setting keyframes, using Xpresso, and even just spot-checking different values without adding any animation.
On closer inspection I’m almost sure it’s got to be something going wrong with my material, because if I apply just a basic checkerboard to the same model and make the same animation, it works just fine. But never with the material I need!
Is there something wicked obvious I’ve missed? I’ve uploaded my project file here: 3869_rowsanimatedlogo06.c4d.zip, please feel free to take a crack at this if you have any ideas!
By the way, I’m running Cinema 4D R13.051 on Windows 7. Thanks in advance!
EDIT! Further info: It seems that materials that use a SURFACE shader– Bricks, Checkerboard, Fire, etc– DO work just fine, whereas basic shaders such as Noise and Gradient do not. I’m not entirely sure where that brings us, but I thought I’d bring it up just in case. Thanks again!
Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group -
7 Replies
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your texture is mostly Noises that are in 3D space so a V move doesn’t affect them, use UV(2D) space.
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The reason it’s not working is that the noise shader(s) have their own internal space setting. By default they’re set to use Texture space which uses most of the texture tag properties, but apparently does not support offset animation. You could fix it by switching all the noise shaders to UV(2d) space, but that would require you to go in and readjust them to try to make the shader look like your existing shader.
Here’s another thought. Instead of doing that, use a straight extrusion and wrap it around the circle with the spline wrap deformer. The spline wrap includes an offset parameter so you can basically achieve the same thing physically that you were trying to do with the texture offset (requires stick texture tag).
Example: 3870_adamtrowsanimatedlogo06.c4d.zip
Something very weird is happening on the first frame and I’m not sure why, but … cut the first frame. 😉
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Thanks a million Brian and Adam! Really great info here– now that you mention the texture space issue I’m smacking myself upside the head… that makes perfect sense.
I really dig the spline wrap technique Adam suggests since it would let me do some other cool stuff such as animating the Banking to twist the mesh in on itself. The only problem I see with it is that in order to get clean geometry with that idea it looks like the spline rotation needs to be set at a full 360-degree twist, whereas I need to achieve just a half-twist. When I adjust the Spline Rotation to 0.5, I get the crazy-twisted polygon problem at the seam, which in my previous attempt I needed to fix by editing the mesh (see attached image). If I do that here then I’d lose the working Offset property.
I tried making the twist using the Spline Wrap’s Rotation property (between Banking and Spline Rotation) but then the Offset seems to rotate the whole model, which is undesirable for my purposes…
Do you folks think there’s any way to correct the twisted-polygon problem using the Spline Wrap deformer with a half-twist, or would I be better served just adjusting my material to make the Noise shaders work in a 2D UV space? I won’t be heartbroken to lose the parametric freedom of the deformer, though it would be super cool to keep those options open if at all possible.
Thank you both again for your help!
Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group -
Ah, I didn’t notice that you only wanted a half twist. Unfortunately I can’t figure out a way to avoid the flip at the end using the deformer, but I’ll think on it some more.
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Oh no worries! Yeah, it might be too much for a parametric system to sort out, depending on what process the Spline Wrap deformer uses to properly join the seams in a full-twist. Bummer that there probably isn’t a way to “best-fit” vertices that are close together in parametric systems…
In the meantime, I’ve found a stop-gap technique that gets the look about 80-90% of the way there– changing the texture tag from UVW Mapping to Spherical, and then rotating the texture’s Heading. It’s not perfect because the projection allows the texture to drift across the twists in the stone, but it looks almost right.
The assumption I’d walked into the scene with– as a heavy After Effects user– was that I could animate the translation of the Noise shaders themselves, sort of like the Offset Turbulence property in AE’s noise effects. Alas, I couldn’t find an equivalent property in the noise shader. Might I have missed something similar to that? Seems to me, if I can tell the shader to offset on one axis, rather than telling the tag to offset, I might have better luck.
Thanks once again for lending your mind to the puzzle!
Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group -
you should be able to rotate the texture tag even as a UVW (but it won’t show until you render) the only other possibility I could think of was to use a helix so you could offset the extrude without it needing to flip 180 at it gets back to zero and then offsetting 50%-ish with a repeat… it’s probably not perfect at the join but at the scale I’m looking at it and in that lighting it seems ok.
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Wonderful! Great idea using the helix Brian. There are some imperfections at the seam as you say, but the Displacement on the stone material does an awful lot to mask that.
And as for the effect breaking when the offset passes 50%, for my purposes that ring will be spinning far too slowly for that to ever come up. This is just fantastic.
Thanks very much Brian and Adam for all of your help! I’ve learned a ton from this discussion!
Best,
Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer / Lead AE
Lone Wolf Documentary Group
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