Creating tiling, animated textures with 3ds Max 2010
polycounter lvl 6
Hello there! I'm trying to use 3ds Max to generate animated textures; I've already got the rendering set-up working fine, but there's a few snags I'm stuck on:
- None of the frames tile; it's okay for what I'm using it for right now (a model texture) but kinda bad if I ever wanted to make a world / tiling texture
- Phases! Right now, I've had to sort of 'wave' the phases, going from 1, to 0, to 2, back to 1. Is there a different material type I could use which would make a looping animation without having to backtrack, as it were?
Replies
Sorry if I'm not understanding you correctly, but that's the first and most important thing to get sorted here.
Eric Chadwick had a good way of getting procedural textures tile.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/tiling_an_animated_texture.html
He also has a way to make them loop without reversing the animation.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/looping_a_procedural_texture.html
Another way to do it is to project the texture onto a Torus primitive, then RenderToTexture from that. A torus has seamless UVs in both U and V, so a 3D texture gets baked into a perfect tile. Only drawback is there's some stretching here and there, you have to play with the radii to get a good aspect ratio, but even then it still stretches.
Best way is to use a procedural that tiles already, like the Dark Tree ones. Check out their free Symbiont plugin.
Edit.. this freebie is pretty awesome.
http://www.dualheights.se/caustics/#images