I’ve had some limited success using image sequences to add animated materials within Omniverse (as in a video playing on a TV screen not animating a dsiplacement map procedurally). Is there support within OpenUSD to use other animation formats on materials, .avi, .mp4 etc.? This would be simplier and offer more options when creating animated materials on prims, if support could be added.
It’s a problem we are interested in solving for our UsdUVTexture node support, but we just muscled through a show that would really have benefitted from it, so the priority is not urgent right now.
OK, thanks for the update. The workflow for image sequences in Composer has been improved, which helps. We have found that post production in AE also works (we produce scenes with many animations and options), although adds a step.
It’s a problem we are interested in solving for our UsdUVTexture node support
The Foundry Nuke team would be very interested in helping pull on this thread.
Perhaps consider supporting just-in-time frame number resolving in Hydra texture paths similar to how the <UDIM> token is resolved. Something like <frame>, <####>, <%04d>, etc. For movies the frame token could perhaps be on the end of the path: foo.mp4:<####> (however I have no experience in how OIIO handles subimage frame referencing.)
For an application like Nuke which almost always has animating image textures it must currently repopulate the shader parameters in the geometry system on frame changes even if the shader isn’t being actively changed by the user. Nuke’s internal renderer can easily handle a custom token on the texture paths but Storm wouldn’t visualize them, so we’ve been limited to the separate time sample method.
Cheers,
-jonathan