About a week ago, I promised to post a short tutorial on how to use P5 to change a texture on a figure in an animation. Dodger's two newest Aeon figures (set and Anna) age from an early teen to the full sized M3 and V3 figures, and by using the P5 material room, you can make their textures age with them. This is really great for animations. This is my first tutorial, so be kind. There are other tutorials on this at other sites, using slightly different methods, but this is about the simplest. Step 1: Create a blank scene and load the character. Step 2: Apply your texture (I used ZetaStudio's Breathgen Kids texture converted to V3). Note: textures should be compatible in tone. A big variation in texture color will make the transition a bit, uh, striking in the animation. This can be a good point if you're animating a werewolf or Hulk though. For each material zone in the figure, do the following. Really you only have to do it for one body type mat zone, and one head type mat zone and just copy and paste the nodes to the other appropriate mat zones when you're set. Step 3: Go to the material room and add the following nodes: A) One more Image Map B) One Blender C) One Math Function D) One Frame Number variable Step 4: Load the second texture to the second Image Map node (I used ZetaStudio's Iago converted to M3).

Step 5: Connect the nodes as follows: A) PoserSurface Diffuse_Color to the Blender B) Blender Input_1 to the texture you want in frame 1 of your animation. C) Blender Input_2 to the texture you want in frame 30 of your animation. (the color for these two should be set to white) D) Blender Blending to Math Functions. Set the Math_Argument to Divide, and the values to 1. E) Math_Functions Value_1 to Frame_Number. Set Vaulue_1 to 1 and Value_2 to frame 30 The Material room will look like this:

Variations in texture can be used not only in animating, but to get some nice mixtures in textures without having to merge 2 textures in a paint program. And, as I've shown here, it's very nice for any character that can change dramatically in an animation, like werewolves, vampires, Hulk-like morphing (can you say "Freak?"), and the Aeon figures that age. My next tutorial (in a day or so) will be how to convert clothing so it will have aging features compatable with the Aeon figures. It's actually pretty easy.

Very good Tute, sir. :)

Oh goodie! That's a neat trick!

Very clever tip - thanks!

Amazing and clever. Thanks!

Once upon a time, I did this sort of thing with P4 by rendering two differently-textured but otherwise-identical animations, and then crossfading them in Adobe Premiere. P5 makes it all unnecessary.