Is it possible to have the skin texture change inside an animation? Would like to have the character morph between two different characters and have the skin change as well. Thanks

If you want to change between two textures, you can use a blender node to do that. If it's more complex than that, you can always use a video (avi on Windows, mov on Mac) as texture.

The way I've done it before, for a werewolf transformation, is to use two characters, going through the same animations, transposed on top of one another. Set the texture maps on each one separately - sadly, a texture map can't be animated. Then, animate the transparency settings on each one so there's a blend from one model's visibility to the other. But now that stewer mentiones using te blender, I might go back and give it a try using that... :) jonthecelt

yes, jon, your earlier statement "a texture map can't be animated" was in direct contradiction to stefan's. that was true for P4 anyway, IIRC.

Not true, miss nancy... there is a difference between the diffuse colour channel, which most textyure maps are plugged into, and the 2d image map node, which is what stores the actual map info. Diffuse colour and blender nodes, such as the one suggested by stefan, are animatable. The image source channel of an image map, however, is not - once you load an image into it, you're stuck with it throughout the animation. what stewer suggested was that, if you use a blender node, and plug in two image maps (one into each colour channel), then by animating and changing those colour values, you should be able to blend from one image map to the other in the diffuse colour channel - which is something different entirely from trying to change the texture map used in a single node. Hope this make sense - if/when I have the time, I'll try and take some screenshots to make it simpler to see wht I'm talking about. jonthecelt

Here is an example of using the blend node to change between texture maps in an anim. V3 texture to the V3 zombie texture, with morph as well. You can see the scalp doesn't change but the face does for clarity. I suppose another way to have an animated texture in a single node could be to maybe use a movie node?

Message edited on: 02/19/2006 16:33

Hey, that's exactly what I was looking for Raven! Your example works great. Would it be possible to get either a step-by-stp or a screen shot of your materials screen so I can figure this out? Which ever is easist. Thanks to everyone for their input and help! Nebula

Here's my material room set-up for the animated gif in my previous post. 1: The Blend node needs to be added. 2: Right-click the little keys and change them to Animated. They should become green. 3: Connect the blend node to the two textures you want to animate between. You will have to add a new image map node for the second texture. 4: The Blending value is at 0, this is the setting to give you your first texture, as shown at the bottom of the main PoserSurface node.

Changing the Blending Value to 1 then gets the second texture showing, as seen at the bottom of the PoserSurface node. You would obviously have to do the above for all bodyparts, and again for bump maps if you used them as well. For my little anim I set frames to 16. I set a keyframe at frame 1 using the material room settings from the first pic. I then went to frame 12 and set the zombie morph value to 1, went to the material room and changed the Blending value to 1 and set another keyframe. Turning off Skip Frames in the anim menu and using full tracking and previewing the anim I could roughly see the desired effect. Hope that helps :)

This is excellent! Thank you so much for all your efforts! I will give it a try this week. I've never really messed around in the Material room much. This should be a good learing experience! Nebula