Flashing Neon?

[dogrokket]

Does anyone have any suggestions in regards to making a neon sign appear to flash on and off?

[dogrokket]

animate a lit and non lit polly to switch back and forth in front of each other. Works like a charm

Thanks md! I will have to explore this, because I'm a blender dude now...

[Bananarama]

An animated texture would work fine for this:

http://railsimilarity.blogspot.com/2009 ... tures.html

I'm sure there's a means of doing this in Blender.

[dogrokket]

An animated texture would work fine for this:

http://railsimilarity.blogspot.com/2009 ... tures.html

I'm sure there's a means of doing this in Blender.

Thanks Hack, there seems to be a number of different ways to do this in blender. I'll have to figure out the most efficient and one that works with the exporter. Thanks!

[Chacal]

Every time I'm reminded of project Similarity, I cry a little.

[dogrokket]

Actually, I haven't found a tutorial that deals with animated textures in blender. Actually, I should clarify: There are many tutorials dealing with animated textures in blender, BUT none that I have found for TS... I wish I knew of one! I'm working on a neon sign that has ten different images. I got them to work as an image sequence in blender, but the igs exporter looks at it and says 'Huh?' If anyone has done an animated texture in blender, I sure would love to hear from you! The post above from Hack references ace files that look like this: XXXXX_anim3.ace.

Do animated textures in TS have to follow this naming convention?

[Chacal]

@mdurdan: UKTrainSim.com has all the information about the exporter.

[dogrokket]

There are no railworks pluggins for blender as such, that I know of. There are two RW exporters that I know of, and I have been using this one:
http://members.uktrainsim.com/filelib-directory.php?form_hide=on&form_country=15&form_sim=14&form_path=ty=10,cls=2838
It comes with a pdf help file, which is kind of daunting, because it was written by someone much smarter than most of us. You just have to fool around with it; trial and error. Mostly error, but it does work. I have managed to export some fairly simple models, with night textures. I haven't figured out the LODs and grouping quite yet, but I am close. The problem that you are going to run in to is this; there are a few tuts out there (on this forum) that show how to export with blender 2.4x. Blender is now up to 2.69, and the interface is different. I really like working in blender now, but translating the work to TS is a pain in the arss! Mainly because you're blazing your own trail and watching reams of blender tutorials on youtube. Oh, that's just me... sorry. I will write a tutorial when I feel confident enough, but for now, I'm in the wind. And dang, now you have to interface with the new brownprint, er, blueprint editor which is like sticking straws into a piece of Styrofoam.

[dogrokket]

I know they have the tutorial for the exporter but I need it for the animated textures

If you find one, please post! I'm going to start another thread on this.