If you want a frame by frame animation, it's done by arranging the frames into a grid on a single texture, and using the Texture Animation setting in the model editor.

It's also possible to do move the the texture coordinates around with material expressions.

Wanted to check out the samples of this tut but the site is gone (bottom)https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Creating_a_Waterfall_Material
Can't find anything on how to make this grid, size, formats.
Maybe you know some tut or link to shed some light ?

For a waterfall, I'd just use a scrolling material.

For the grid, you'd just put the number of rows/columns in the material settings, so any kind of grid should work. I don't think there is any documentation for either way.

Nice! I just posted about this same subject, but deleted it when I saw this thread pop-up immediately after. Hopefully, I can figure out the grid thing.

Hi Prax,
Bashing my head against the wall for now.
Lots of dents, not in the wall...

Hey soontekk. I got it to work! It was a bit of a hassle, because it's an emmissive texture, so I needed to tile the light mask map, as well as the color and normal map, but it works now. I just used the slider for the gloss map and didn't bother with reflective. It doesn't match the pattern of the blinking spotlight, but it's an improvement over no blink at all. It sounds like there are some scripted methods for matching up the blink pattern, but that's beyond my novice skill level. I could swear I saw something listing the on-off time frames for the light options, but I can't find it now. Anyway, I came across this Gimp plugin for tiling layers. Be sure to read the advice in the comments if you want to give it a try.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/6zgz4s/how_to_tile_layers_automatically_into_a_single/


Rectus- Thanks once more! Your generous sharing of knowledge in these forums has played a role in many of the new skills I have gained.

soontekk- Not sure if this will help you, but my final grids were 4096X4096, with 4 columns of 4 rows. Although my intended surface was rectangular, I resized the images to squares for the texture maps. On the "attributes" tab for the material, I set the world mapping back to the rectangles. I clicked the "fit both" option to apply the material to the rectangular faces.

Hi Praxeos, thanks for the heads up and good to hear you solved it.
My brain is shutting down it seems, i'll ha ve a fresh look at this tomorrow and hopefully make some sort of progress. Thx again mate.

Did the moving texture tip Rectus was talking about for my water texture, works great (another dependency i can remove from water i borowed from another environment).

I'll look into the texture grid today and report back.
Cheers for the help guys.

Glad you got it to work! This was my first attempt at authoring a material. Up to now, I've borrowed them from asset packs (I'm only on my second environment). I started with a photo of a fluorescent light from my basement, the kind with the plastic textured grid-pattern cover. The raised pattern on the light cover was too washed out in the photo, so I created my own textured normal map in Gimp. I combined elements of the normal map and the edited photo to make the illumination mask.

I made a static material and, with the help of Rectus' advice, an animated flickering version. Both turned out great. I had previously used a solid white emissive texture for my light covers. Even though the animated flicker isn't synchronized to the flickering spotlight, it's a big improvement. I'll probably tackle the synchronization in the future, but I'm learning one step at a time.

I know the feeling man. This is my first map and i took a month off work to learn this (next to Blender and a bunch of other stuff i had on my list). Needless to say i underestimated the time needed to learn Hammer but the progress i made (thanks to Rectus) is incredible.

All i need now is some basic animations like doors and i can't get the audio to work yet which is very annoying.
I'll check out both your rooms for sure !

Please do. Let me know what you think.

By the way, I just updated the "Concrete" environment a couple minutes ago, so you should be able to see my new fluorescent light textures (including the animated one). I also fixed a couple bugs with my elevator. One problem I was having was that it would frequently parent players outside the elevator shaft. I referenced a couple of Rectus' scripts to figure out how to set the player's local origin relative to the elevator. Now, even if someone teleports to the edge of the elevator, it will force them all the way inside. Just a couple weeks ago, I would not have even dreamed of being able to figure out something like that!

Nice work! Lots of cool setpieces in there.

I'd be a bit careful about using blinking lights though. A lot of people are sensitive the them, and it's harder to look away in VR. Often you can get a nice spooky effect by just blinking the fixture itself.

Also, I noticed an issue with the elevator. It' seems to assume that you are in the center of the playspace. You can fix that by using the x and y coodinates from player:GetHMDAvatar():GetOrigin() along with the z coordinate of player:GetOrigin(), and it will give you the ground position under the players head.

I visited them both yesterday and was really impressed :o
Loving the concrete map and all the functions of buttons and walls etc!
I can see this evolving in some eerie macabre subterranian maze with hidden rooms and secretive experiments :D

The golf was a bit weird at first with the golclub handling but i got to score a few holes.
Did you try to set the club as a tool so it gets placed perfectly in a holding position when you grab it ?

Also if you have trouble with holding and freezing items try creating a lower res collision mesh.
The first interactable objects i made froze in the air a lot untill i changed the coll mesh to convexified meshes

Anyway, good work sofar and love to see it grow !