Sorry for the late reply as I’m getting re-familiarized with C4D. I was able to
I’ll try to explain the process and the problems I ran into.
Mission: Animated Texture on hexagon objects scattered on an overall Spherical object. (The frames are rendered RGB +Alpha, 500x500px format: .png)
I should preface that I am running on an iMacPro using R20.
This is how I achieved.
1)Created a hexagon using a Nside spline object and an Extrude.
1.Created a material and applied it to the Extrude.
2. In this material: Goal is to apply the frames to a multi shader in Luminance and Alpha. (Hopeful end result is so I can control the playback of the animations using the Hue Slider in the Transform Tab of the Cloner that I will apply this to.) First I make sure in Editor that Animated preview is checked.
A. I go Luminance> Texture> Mograph> Multishader
Click on Multishader>Add Folder> pointed to directory with the Animated Texture frames. [FIRST PROBLEM: All the frames came in NOT in sequential order causing playback to be the frames play scattered] Reached out to Maxon- advised to delete prefs. I did, I also went through and removed the software entirely and reinstalled. Problem persists, I also have a laptop that I run R20 on as well. Problem occurs there too.
B. [WORK AROUND- Texture> Clear> Load first frame from directory, double clicked on image>Animation Tab> hit Calculate (so it recognizes the end/total frames in directory. -Scrub timeline make sure it plays. Go back to Luminance Tab> Texture>Copy Shader.
C. Luminance Tab> Texture>Multishader. Click on Multishader- Under Shaders> Texture1>PASTE SHADER. Now click TO LAYERS and hit YES. This seemed to have taken all the frames in the directory loaded them into the multi shader in sequential Order.
3. At this point in order for me to see the playback, I needed to apply the Extruded Nside to a Cloner, in this case to a Sphere Icosehedron. Set Cloner> Object Tab>Mode>Object, then dragged Sphere to the Object slot. Distribute on vertex with Y+ as Up Vector. Animation played on all the hexagons created nicely. Now I need the blacks of the animation to be Alphaed.
[SECOND PROBLEM- I backed up went to Luminance Tab> Texture> COPY SHADER (the multishader I set up) simply went to Alpha Texture>PASTE SHADER . Now animation blacks are transparent works like a charm…. until I have to render. Now I can’t Render the Scene. I confirm that everything is renderable up until I copy pasted the shader to the Alpha Channel. ]
For both problems, I had friends try to replicate on their machine. They are on PC and they ran into no problems A)importing to Multishade- frames come in sequentially B) Copying a multishader to Alpha Channel doesnt stop it from rendering. Steve at Maxon support is looking at this on Macs over there. Its very possible I have run into a Mac Bug for R20.
Getting The hexagons to Animate randomly. I applied A random effector Parameter> Position unchecked, Color Mode Effector Color with a Fall offf with a Sphereical Field. Made sure Field Size was about 500CM Clip to Shape. I made sure the Remapping> Contour Mode is set to Curve and the Spline Preset type is SIN. Spline Animation Speed 30F.
I continued to do this to make sure it worked despite knowing it won’t render cause of the Alpha problem.
This all worked BECUASE I was able to get the Multishade setup (despite the render issue). As I understand thats why you choose Effector Color so it knows to work with the multishade material.
Knowing all this and viewing the gif results, Is there a way I could have done all this without using a multishader?
Key things needed are
1) transparent animated texture on Object that would be cloned all over a sphere
2) Effector that causes the playback of each hexagon animation to play randomly, not at the same time.