Looping animated texture workflow & time offsets per-shot

Community USD
1

Hi,

We have a situation where we are building a city which contains a lot of buildings with animated billboards.

How have people dealt with looping animated textures? Is this even possible? We are authoring the shaders in Solaris but consuming them in Katana via UsdIn.

The main issue we will run into is that each Arnold image node has a set a fixed time samples which are mapped to the frames on the export from Solaris and each shot has a different frame range.

The solution that comes off the top of my head is that we could time offset the shaders (they are being brought into shots via a reference arc) in at the shot level per building. An issue will be 2 shots that both start at the same frame will have a billboard animation from the same frame which will jar in the cut.

Ideally there would be someway to loop the textures used but I am guessing this not curently possible is it?

2

Hi @patricknagle , I can’t think of a simple solution with USD’s current feature-set. The one thing that would give you some more flexibility and easier looping would be to add a Value Clip set “on top of” your references. With Clips, you would still need to specify each looping segment, but it’s all done “non-destructively” via the times clipSet metadata. But it’s awkward in that now you need to put the data for the filename shader attribute in a clip and set up the clips.