Yes, very widely used. Mostly used for things like; particle effects, smoke, sparks, bullet hole debris, water, buttons, computer screens bla bla bla
If you plan to use it in Max Hito's post covered what you need to know.
For in game stuff, most engines you will have to build a specific type of material from a series of rendered images. With source, Unreal and the Doom editor you build that material in the editor. Other games use animated bmp's or various other methods of stringing a series of images together. The key is to render out your images as 24,or 32bit TGA's with either "Alpha Split" or "Pre-Multiplied" checked on. This will give you a B/W opacity mask.
- Alpha split will give you a series of separate images that contain just the opacity info. Use this for engines that don't accept alpha opacity masks.
- Pre-Multiplied will put that info in the alpha channel along with the color info into one file. Use this for engines that accept TGA's and can use the alpha channel as opacity info.
A helpful tip, is to render out your image on a background color close to the colors in your image. It is very common for people to just leave the background black and you end up with a black line around your image making it look fake. If you're doing fire, pick a orange or yellowish color
Ok, maybe i could make my question a bit clearer, since i cant play with it untill i get home,I get the material animation but can you transfer animated 3d onto a plane.
Ex:lets say take a cube put it on a spline path, have it intersecting a plane, animate it moving then bake all maps onto the plane>Normal, complete, la da da
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if its a material you can render it to an AVI and apply that as a texture
If you plan to use it in Max Hito's post covered what you need to know.
For in game stuff, most engines you will have to build a specific type of material from a series of rendered images. With source, Unreal and the Doom editor you build that material in the editor. Other games use animated bmp's or various other methods of stringing a series of images together. The key is to render out your images as 24,or 32bit TGA's with either "Alpha Split" or "Pre-Multiplied" checked on. This will give you a B/W opacity mask.
- Alpha split will give you a series of separate images that contain just the opacity info. Use this for engines that don't accept alpha opacity masks.
- Pre-Multiplied will put that info in the alpha channel along with the color info into one file. Use this for engines that accept TGA's and can use the alpha channel as opacity info.
A helpful tip, is to render out your image on a background color close to the colors in your image. It is very common for people to just leave the background black and you end up with a black line around your image making it look fake. If you're doing fire, pick a orange or yellowish color
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/looping_a_procedural_texture.html
Ex:lets say take a cube put it on a spline path, have it intersecting a plane, animate it moving then bake all maps onto the plane>Normal, complete, la da da