Animated Textures (Legacy 3DS MAX)

Shaders that use a texture can request an animated texture, instead of the texture assigned in the 3DSMax material.

This requires use of specific parameters, such as szAnimatedTexture.

Notes about using animated textures

• You can find out if a shader supports Animated Textures by checking if it has a szAnimatedTexture parameter. The same is true for Lightmaps, except that the parameter is szAnimatedLightmap.

• When using an animated texture, a default texture must also be assigned to the material in 3DSMax.

• During the export, the code tries to optimize the materials. Not finding a texture inside the material, or finding textures all the same when the object will use different textures, could give export problems.

• It is also useful to see in 3DSMax that texture is assigned to the object.

Types of animated textures

The various types of animated textures supported are:

• FramesSequence

• DXWater

General notes

• The definition of the frames that will have an animated texture is done through a script.

• For each animated texture that you want to have, you will need to create a special script that will contain the various frames, as these will be chosen over time, and other specific parameters.

• All these scripts must be put in a single file that the engine will read.

• This file must be called AnimatedTextures.txt and must be in one of the directories containing the textures.

• The engine supports different types of textures, from simple sequences of frames.

• To indicate which type of animated texture you want to create, the szType parameter is present in every script.

Usable materials

Materials and shaders are directives that are defined within the mesh user buffer.

Remember to use only ShaderGen materials.

Texture format

It is good practice that all the textures that make up an animation use the same format. This helps avoid compatibility problems.

Format also means the internal format of the texture. For example, in two .tga files, if one file is 32-bit and and the other file is 8-bit, the files have different formats. This could create problems if used in the same animation.

Format also means resolution, so a certain animation should not have 256 × 512 frames and another 64 × 512 for example.