gigagooga on 4/12/2016 at 18:28
Hello!
Inspired by Geckos latest work i thought, why not try to do something like that myself too, having rustling leaves and wind sounds just don't work if the leaves aren't moving at all..
I got the animated texture itself done, and it seems to work just fine on terrain. The problem however is that since i'm using Daraans tree models i have to set the leaf texture with TextRepl property, and that doesn't seem to work with animated texture. The texture seems to get replaced, but it's frozen to the first frame and no matter what i try it doesn't continue from there.
Afterwards i tried making a test object, to see if there's something wrong with the texture itself, but it seemed to work on that just fine --> Therefore i concluded that animated texture doesn't work through TextRepl property.
Well.. then i thought.. no worries, i'll just open the tree models in Anim8or and change the texture with that. It turns out i can't get the bin file converter to work.. It can convert thiefs original objects, but not Daraans tree models for some reason. It just gives me this mystical message "BintoE stopped working".
Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated! I've been stroking my beard since mid day with this, but neither does that seem to help :P
Gecko on 4/12/2016 at 19:14
An example with "DL_kaka2.bin"!
Open "DL_kaka2.bin" with WinHex or something like that and replace the word "replace0" with "grasswi_". Also you can use another word with the same length and with a "_" at the end! Place your animated texture in the txt16 folder. The first file is called grasswi_.dds and it goes on with grasswi_1 grasswi_2 grasswi_3 ...
Also create a .mtl file with the same name as the animated texture "grasswi.mtl". In my .mtl file i use the command "force_alpha_key" and "ani_rate 40" for example.
Note: If you use an animated texture with transparent background converted to DDS you have to create an .mtl file for EVERY .DDS file! So if you use 99 frames you also have to create 99 .mtl files. This only applies to DDS files with transparency!
This is the way how i use the animated texture.
ZylonBane on 4/12/2016 at 23:03
Quote Posted by gigagooga
Well.. then i thought.. no worries, i'll just open the tree models in Anim8or and change the texture with that.
That's about the worst way to do it because the round trip BIN -> E -> 3DS -> E -> BIN runs an excellent chance of increasing the model face count.
What you
should do is use a binary editor to change the filename directly in the file. I use XVI32 for this.
Nameless Voice on 4/12/2016 at 23:36
Seconding XVI32.
Just make sure that you overwrite the existing characters and don't change the length of the file.
Yandros on 5/12/2016 at 00:09
I use HxD and would recommend it for hex editing.
gigagooga on 5/12/2016 at 10:17
Thanks for the hints!
Now i got it sort of working, from here i think i can manage the rest by myself.
Thanks again!
Have to say... moving leaves add some much life to my mission. I don't think i'll ever go back to static leaves again :P
Another question though. Do you guys reckon this would impact the framerate more than normal static texture does? Their sizes are the same.
john9818a on 7/12/2016 at 19:05
As an alternate solution if you have very few frames you can also use a model tweq. I used this method on a secret door that had an animated gauges sequence. Since there were so few images in that sequence I made a seperate model with each image and cycled through them with the model tweq.
ZylonBane on 9/12/2016 at 15:37
What possible advantage is there to doing it that way?