Hi,

I am trying to create an animated texture file but for some reason it won't load. I am using Windows 7 with a 64 bit operating system and I am aware I need to use an uncompressed avi file to avoid codec issues which I am doing. I create a new node, select movie, load the avi file and plug it in to the diffuse colour slot just as I should but nothing loads. O play the avi movie in a separate window and it plays fine. 

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Heather 

Could you snip* a capture of just the material workspace, so that it will post large enough to read?  Also, click the eye icon on the movie node so that the little preview picture box opens.

*snipping tool:  it's in Start>all programs>accessories.  Right-click on it, and from the menu, select pin to taskbar.  Then it will always be handy.  It allows you to take a cropped screenshot,and save directly, without going through Paint.

Hopefully this is better. Thanks for taking the time to look at it. 

The preview box for the video is blank white.  Either the video has some dead lead-in frames or the video is unreadable by Poser.  Set the specular value to 0.  Un-tick the reflection_Lite_Mult box.  When showing a material capture, snip only the area with the material nodes.

     Interesting that the timeline slider is 2/3 over, yet the frame counter is showing as frame 1.  If you click on the 00001 and type in 15, do you then see anything other than blank white?  Can you verify that the AVI is uncompressed?

     Is that Poser Pro 2010 or Poser Pro 2012?  If it's Pro 2012 with at least SR3 (or is it 3.1?) installed, you can save a series of JPEGs from the video and have the movie node read the JPEGs.

Hi I think I determined that the file size of the video might have been the problem. I have tried a new video which is much smaller and at first I thought it still wasn't working as model is still white but then when I test rendered a patch it showed up as an image (not as a video though. When I created a movie out of it I was hoping the texture would be animated as am using an avi file. But the movie I created of the scene contained no image at all not even the little I got in the test render. I produced an uncompressed avi file from premiere pro but when I loaded that it left the square at the bottom white. So I created the regular avi and I can see what I have shown here in screen shot. However I am having the issues described above. So am now closer but still not the animated texture I need. Any more ideas would be appreciated. 

I am using Poser Pro 2010

I am using Poser Pro 2010

     Hang in there;  we'll get it figured out. :)

    If the scene preview doesn't show the movie texture, try going to render>render settings, select the preview tab, and tick the enable hardware shading box.

     A rendered animation should show the texture rendered.  Did you render in Firefly or in preview?

     Also, consider the scale of the dragon's UV mapping;  You may need to tile the movie to see an effect.  Try setting the movie node's U_scale and V_scale to 0.05, and tick both the mirror_U and mirror_V boxes.

thanks for the encouragement! OK I enable hardware shading as suggested. It still does not allow me to see the movie texture until I have rendered. I render in firefly and changed settings as you suggested. Again they show up as images not a movie. When I select make movie under animation it still just shows the white on the model, no texture at all not even as just an image. I assume it would only show me the animated texture when it is made into a movie anyway. But no luck yet! 

     How are you making the rendered movie?  My suggestion is to use animation>make movie and set it to render a series of PNGs, which you would then compose into a movie.  Set format to image files, and set renderer to Firefly.

     If you render a still (a single frame), do you see the AVI texture on the dragon?  Are you rendering in Firefly (rather than in preview)?

     As a test, you might add an image map node, plugging it into the ambient color socket.  Set the ambient color block to white.  Set the ambient value to 0.25 and use a checkerboard image for the image map.  Render that.  This will check to ensure that the dragon has not somehow lost its UV mapping.

     I use the movie node a lot to make animated textures, so I can assure you that the concept works.  I use it animate displacement to produce water ripples and flickering flames, animate transparency for bursts of pixie dust, and animate color for radar screens.  We just have to figure out what is going wrong with your workflow.

Thanks again for the continuing support! Yes I do see the texture when I render a single frame and yes I am rendering in firefly. I did change the settings as you suggested and rendered a series of png files. I have never recomposed them into an avi file before and seems like an extra step I wish I didn't have to take. I am also wondering how useful it will be to me as my end purpose is to animate the skin on a dragon and then cut the footage of the dragon into live action footage...might be totally doable once I see how you reassemble as a movie...but like I said wish it wasn't necessary! Your work sounds fascinating and beautiful! 

You want to add the dragon to live action footage?  Then consider rendering just the dragon, and you can overlay that onto the live action.

     Yes, I realize that it's added work, but if you render directly to AVI, you can't correct brightness, compression etc. afterward, and more importantly, if anything goes wrong (crash, etc) you lose the whole thing and must start from scratch.  If Poser crashes while rendering a series of PNGs, you only need to pick up where it left off.

Hmmm not sure I'm following you? Add just the dragon? It will still need the textures...Maybe you could clarify?

Thanks! 

     I meant render the (textured!) dragon with no background as PNGs, which you can then overlay onto the live footage.

Like this, except you would not want to render ground shadows for the dragon...

Beautiful! :-) 

     Did you succeed in getting the dragon skin animated?

I made this several years ago. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFlFczEUGT4

My memory is fuzzy right now about this, but if I remember correctly, I had trouble making the movie texture work at first but then I figured out it was due to the frame rate of the video file.  The frame rate has to be a whole number.  It cannot be a number with decimal values.   Since I was animating at 30 frames per second, I made the video to be 30 frames per second.  Also, the video was compressed with Divx encoding, so the file size was very small.   I know that for sure because I was able to include the video file in the laptop package that I am selling in my store.