Daraan on 2/8/2013 at 15:27

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And here I'm again. It will take about one more week until I start mapping and modeling again.

This is a tutorial I wrote 4 moths ago, I don't know if anyone else found out about this and wrote a tutorial about it but here it is:
Before I gone absent (again) I worked a lot with the features of the new material files especially the render pass option is very powerful in adding various effects to your textures. I worked me pretty deep into it - though at the moment I forgot a lot but that will change when I work on it again. So if you have questions about it just ask.

How to make an animated texture which you can use on replacement surfaces.

I bet some of you already tried it to have an animated texture and an item with texture replacement. And I bet It didn't work.

In this tutorial I explain how you can get working animated replacement textures with the help of .mtl files.

IMPORTANT NOTE 1: You should not use this method on complex object with many replacement faces.

IMPORTANT NOTE 2: It's recommended to place these special effect textures
in a separate location from terrain textures, and NOT use terrain textures, due to potential conflicts
with the terrain texture manager and family palettes. The conflicts might result in eventual crashes,
even if everything seems to initially work.

So lets begin

1.) Create a new textfile and rename it to YourImage00.mtl

Example:
Your image sequence is: Computer00.tga, Computer01.tga, Computer03.tga
then you name your .mtl file Computer00.mtl

NOTE: Computer, Computer1 or Computer, Computer_1 is also possible. Check point 3 to see how to do it correctly.

2.) Open your .mtl file
Cope this into your file:

force_full_alpha
render_material_only 1
render_pass {
ani_rate 500
texture * 0 "$TEXTURE"
}


3.) Adjust values
As you might have guessed your have to adjust

ani_rate
the number behind represents the time in milliseconds until the next fame is displayed

texture
a) The word $TEXTURE will automatically use the corresponding texture to the .mtl file. You also can replace it with "subfolder1\sub2\texname" (Including ")
b) The * adds a specific prefix to the textures. Here some examples:

If you use Tex00, Tex01 ... just use *
If you use Tex_, Tex_1, Tex_2 ... use *_
If you use Tex, Tex_1, Tex_2 ... use *_

c) You can ignore the 0 if you want. The meaning of it is to limit the amount of frames. So if you just want 3 Textures replace the 0 with a 3
0 means everything will be used.

4.) Now create you object in the editor and assign the replacement texture (of course the one with the .mtl file you just created).

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For more options and more details read doc\material-format.txt
Also check my water demo where I used render pass to move a texture on the surface to create the flow effect: (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=142103) Animated+Flowing Water Object
Demo: (http://www.mediafire.com/?bons47hbt27nojt) Download Link

It's actually the file I made for my water and it might have a bit more information than necessary.