animating texture layers with mute - please help!

#1

Hello,

I’m trying to create a CustomPSet to control the visibility of texture layers on an object.

I’d like to be able to key (with one custom parameter) the solo and mute parameters of a layer so that when one layer is soloed, the others are muted.

I know how to create simple custom P sets, but this seems like it’s going to take a bit of expression help to make happen.

Can anyone help me figure out how to do this?

thank you,

mm

#2

Create the custom parameter set.
open the property page on the layer. If you’re in the Texture Layer Editor, right click on the layer and choose "inspect;
drag and drop the green animation button of the Mute parameter of the layer onto the custom parameter property page.

#3

Hi and thanks for your reply.

I’m having a real difficulty in getting xsi to respect the mute keyframes that i set - for example I have 2 texture layers, when I mute one and key it, sometimes the other texture layer is not shown, even though it’s keyed as on. I was wondering if I just didn’t understand the solo/mute functionality of the layer system, but it seems to me that there could possibly be something wrong going on here.

Been playing with this for hours and still not getting consistant results.
Could someone confirm that there isn’t a bug and that keying the mutes on layers actually works?

mm

#4

oh gee… nevermind! User Error (as usual). Seems I didn’t have one of the textures assigned to the proper support.

thanks for your help!

mm

#5

hmm I lied. I cannot figure out what is going on, but it seems like the mutes just stop working for no rhyme nor reason once they’re keyed.

strange.

:confused:

mm

#6

(also posted at softimage.net)

Hello,

I’m at my breaking point trying to figure out this problem:

I’ve loaded a scene file here:

http://www.lasercade.com/mute_test.zip

In the scene there is a model with a constant shader with two texture layers applied (X.tga and O.tga).
I’ve created a custom parameter set with the mute buttons of each layer and I’ve alternately animated them on and off on frames 1 and 10. You’ll see if you render the object that the textures are NOT paying attention to the mutes at all (sometimes both of them disappearing, sometimes just one of them appearing even when it’s mute is on, etc.).

I’m at my wit’s end trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong… it seems like it should be an easy thing to do, but the textures are just not reliably switching. Sometimes it seems to be working (for example, if I reload a .tga file) but then will go back to it’s old misbehavior.

If someone could take a look at this and tell me where I’m going wrong, or point me in another direction towards animating layers on/off on an object, I would be desperately grateful at this point.

thank you,

mm

#7

Something like this…?

#8

hi vibrunnica,
Thanks for your reply. It does seem like thats a solution… one problem though is i have like 18 different textures to swap out for 2 characters and it just seems cumbersome to do it with multiple mix layer nodes.

I would really like luceric’s mute suggestion to work as that seems the most straightforward.

I’m really hoping someone can figure out why the muting of textures in my example is not working. Is it a bug?

thanks,

mm

#9

I’m going to post it to Softimage and see if it’s a bug. They were really quick on getting back to me about the incidence shader bug (now fixed in 7.01).

thanks,

mm

#10

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