3.j Texture Animation
Texture animation rox. Within every material's panel, there lives a Texture Animation Parameters panel. The boxes in this panel allow you to make a texture move - neat! The first thing you need to do to access this functionality is turn ON texture animation.
Currently, IMVU supports two types of texture animation, Scrolling and Cycling. These are accessed in the Mode dropdown. Scrolling allows you to slide the texture across the surface of a mesh in a direction and speed of your choosing. Cycling allows you to sample frames within a given texture. An example of Scrolling can be found on the water in the Cast Away Raft room (product651). An example of Cycling can be found on the fire in the Romantic Log Cabin room (product608).
Cell width and Cell height are used for Cycling animations. The number here is in pixels and tells the animator what size you want your animation cell size to be. For example, if I had a texture that was 128x64 and I happened to have four separate frames drawn across it from left to right, my Cell width would be (128/4=) 32 and my Cell height would be 64.
Offset X and Y allow you to offset where your first frame of a Cycling animation begins. This is very handy if you have one large texture that contains several Cycling animations on it. Set your X and Y to 0, 0 to use the full texture, or different values to use a subset of the texture. The cell rectangle does not have to divide the dimensions of the texture evenly, and it doesn't have to have the same proportions as the texture.
Start Cell is used for Cycling animations and tells the animator which frame to start on. This is handy for things like flickering candles where you may want to use the same texture on a bunch of candles but don't want them to animate the exact same way (meaning looking EXACTLY the same in IMVU). With this feature, you could use the same texture on multiple candles but have them all appear different in IMVU. Of course, you COULD just make new textures per each flickering candle but that would needlessly increase the file size of your product.
Direction X and Y are used for Scrolling animations. These deltas specify the amount (direction and speed) to scroll, positive numbers going down and right. The delta is in Fixels (fractional pixels)
# of Cells (I know, it says 0 of cells - we're working on it) allows you to define how many Cells the animator should include in a given animation. By calling setting Offset X/Y or Start Cell, and then setting the number of cells with this function, you can use a single texture sheet for multiple sets of cells.
Frames per Cell allows you to slow down the animation. You can specify that it takes
multiples of 1/30 sec to advance a frame of animation.
3.k Product Naming Convention
Now is the time to Save As a different file name. The file name can be anything at this point as the name is automatically converted to a product number upon upload. It is important to keep track of your submitted product's new name/product number as this will be handy when you want to make an inherited product.
3.l Material files with Alpha
There is an issue with loading a Material file that contains an alpha channel into a slot that does not already contain it. Basically, it pretty much breaks your product. However, there is a workaround. Once you have loaded a Material file that has Alpha into a non-alpha Material slot, the product looks for an alpha material but can't find one. Plus, because the original Material file did not contain an Alpha map, you don't have the option to browse for the Alpha map. So, SAVE the product. After you save, you will notice that all of the material icons have disappeared. Don't worry - now that there are no textures in those texture slots, you are now able to browse for your alpha channel. Do so, hit Apply Changes and all should come back looking healthy.
