Animation Offset uses not original Framecounts

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SPA
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Oct 12, 2010 5:36 pm

Animation Offset uses not original Framecounts

Post by SPA »

The subject of this topic might be a bit irritating, so I try to explain it with an example:

In VrayScatter, I used the Animation feature to scatter different "states of stiffness" of tufts of grass over the meadows in my render scene.

Therefore I created one animated vrayproxy as source, which had the grass pointing up to the sky in Frame 1 and hanging down to the ground in Frame 10. Then I set the animation speed in VrayScatter to 0, so the grass isn't animated at all, and used a hand painted texture map in the offset mask to determine the certain look of the grass at a certain point. E.g. in the middle of the meadow, its darker, so it uses the more upwards grass, and near a street next to the meadow the map is nearly white, so it shows there the more down-hangning grass. By using this system, the transitions between the different states looked very soft and natural.

Now I am trying to convert this scene to MultiScatter, but it seems like something in the handling of the Animation Offset has changed.
Seems like the Offset doesn't relate to the object's original Animation-Framecount, but its Framecount multiplied inverse with the Animation Speed. So, when setting the speed to 0,01, the Offset Range of a 10-Frame-Animation isnt 1-10 anymore but 1-1000.

Unfortunately, this kills the former working method of using an animation as an "map-controlable-object-container", because when setting the Speed to 0 (, so that the animation isnt played at all but only its Frames are used as different object states,) the max offset would have to be 10/0 and thus stretches to infinity.

Was this changed by intention? I presumed maybe rather by accident, because when reading the docs, the line "Offset lets set animation time shift within the limits of From and To." makes you think offset is always meant in the animation's unmultiplied time grid.

Maybe you have an idea for a workaround?

Thanks in advance,

Stefan
www.virgin-lands.com
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