I want Players to be able to use small GIFs animations to customize various “TV Displays” (similar concept) that spawn into the level. I know i can extract frames from the GIFs, import them in the editor, make Sprites and then make Flipbooks but i’m looking for a way to do this at runtime. I’ve seen Rama’s VictoryPlugins can import JPGs as texture and so i’m thinking it would be great to, let’s say, make an array of small textures ad use them to make a Flipbook…
The scope is: Import custom user GIFs as animated textures.
Any other suggestion to achieve the result will be appreciated.
P.s. Thanks to Epic Games for releasing this Awesome Engine to the World!
I need it to be as simple as possible for the end users to use their own GIFs or sequences of frames (as separated JPGs files). Like they can put their GIFs\JPGs Frames into a game folder and the game should load it at runtime.
Maybe i’m asking too much but i started wondering when i see the Rama’s plugins works so good in importing textures at runtime…
Media Textures are wonderfull (really) but i want to try a different approach… to make things easyer for the end users…
if you want download that images you can use “Download Image” and make the array of 2d textures, if want load from hard disk you can too, but the engine options limited to the game directory load (you can write your own of course)
then use “Canvas render target 2D” for update that texture with timeline or something like this for switch images and create the animation, and apply to any object in the scene with a dinamic material.
Here a video i make last month how to use Canvas Render, its for render text at run time but for that its the similar, except you must add some timer for switch images and create the .illusion of animation.
Ok… switching taxtures param to make animations seems to be too heavy for the hardware resources. Think i’ve to give up for now… thanks to all for the replies!
I think i’ve found some sort of solution… this may have something to do with what was suggested by knack (or maybe is exactly what he suggested!)… anyway, this is what i’ve done:
This is the function that switches the TextureParameter of the DynamicMaterial (needs some tuning):
i’ve tried this with about 30 actors playing the animation this way and it seems not a problem for the engine, but the level in which i’ve tried is empty, the Texture Frames was in lowres (max 500x500) and not more than 100 frames long.
For now, i mark this as an answer… hope this can help someone!
P.s. You need to make the function that load the JPG Frames (*.jpg files on the HD) into the Frames Array (check Rama’s Victory Plugins)
P.p.s. Sorry for bad english
