How to get a texture "swimming" effect

#1

[size=2] Hi
What I would like to be able to do is, to have a texture support that I can animate, to create effect of texture swimming over the surface of my model. Now this all sounds simple enough but I have found that its not as simple as I thought it would be.

  1. I am not sure how to get decent UVs and still keep the support the way I want. If I create only one support for a whole object, than I can animate it and it all works fine but UVs look terrible. I could do subprojections to get decent UVs but than everything that was “subprojected” is no longer controled by that main support so I can’t animate it as I want.
    Is there any way, how to do subprojections and later connect it back to main support?

I have a feeling that only way how to do that, would be to have only one support and than edit all UVs by hand without any use of subprojections. Am I right??? I hope not.

  1. Or better yet is there any way how to use UVs from, for example RoadKill and later connect them to new support? I guess not.

3 ) Another strange thing is, that I am not able to freeze modeling in any way, without getting rid of Supports at the same time. Which leads me to guestion, if Supports were meant to be animated at all? It seems they are only meant to be temporal help for getting your UVs.

But if thats the case, how could I get that texture swimming effect? Are there any methods / plugins / whatever to accomplish this???
I would really appreciate some help, because I have spent last couple of days trying to figure out how to do that and I am starting to run out of ideas.
Thanks[/size]

#2

maybe this will help: http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?t=3057

#3

Thanks for the link.
After some experiments, I have concluded, that unfortunately this is probably not going to help me. The problem is, that When I click on Geo2UV than my XSI just freezes. When I look into Task Manager in my WindowsXP (32bit) XSI6.5 has 100% CPU usage and whole OS is veeeery slow. I have tried to wait for quite a while but it doesn’t seems that it would ever end.
The mesh that I have tried it with has 1662 polygons.
I have actually managed to make it work with simple objects, like sphere and cube but even with 64 polygon sphere there is couple of seconds when XSI and whole OS freeze. But than it all works fine. It seems that it takes a lot of computations to generate that UV setup. Actually its probably so intensive that my computer just can’t handle it or so it seems.
But its only 1662 polygons that should be like nothing!
My computer is far from powerful but its not that bad either, I think.
Its Intel Core2Duo 2,4Ghz, 2GB ram, GForce 7900GS

So basically I am at the beginning. This would work with simple objects but it doesn’t work with more complicated ones, which is exactly the same problem as with those Supports.

Any other ideas?
Thanks

#4

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