creating an animated billboard?

[Class1987]

Hi everyone I'm trying to find out how to create an animated billboard, I've already created the billboard itself but not sure how to animate several adverts like you see on the motorways. Any advice on this procedure would be most helpful cheers, Ian.

[AndiS]

Do you use a special billboard blueprint? There is one because they planned in-game advertising back in 2006 or 2005.

If you are fine with a scenery blueprint, then you could go for animated scenery.

But if it is only about changing the texture, then you should take a look at the UV-scrolling kind. They used it on the birds that were more like ants, restlessly marching their loops.

The developer docs are a bit terse on the subject:
https://sites.google.com/a/railsimdev.c ... #TOC-Birds

Most likely a search for bird in the Asset folder should bring a sample up. I never spent any time with them, but you ad scrolling could be a good use case for this method, albeit with much slower UV scrolling.

[Class1987]

No I’m not using a special billboard blueprint I’ve never even tried
I’m using a normal scenery blueprint and just want the advertisement textures to change as an animation like you see on the motorways plus lit up at night too. I did notice on the link you sent me on station board animation would that be worth looking into for this type of animation, any advice?
Cheers, Ian.

[AndiS]

I never tried any of these.

On reading it again, I noticed two things.

1) They don't mention a blueprint name for the birds. So they seem to be normal scenery. But don't ask me where you set the scroll speed then.

2) For all I can remember, station boards where you can configure the name never made it into release. I am not a route builder but I see everybody designing their station boards to have one solid texture that contains all the letters. Having individual quads for each letter might kill performance. Or they found getting the spacing right was a problem.

The bottom line is that this documentation is a very valuable source for starting points but not a cook book with fail-safe recipes. Since I only ever used Blender, I was never temped to see it that way.

[Class1987]

Right I've manged to get the animation to work only issue I'm having is the animation is a bit quick, now I'm sure you have seem the speed on billboard adverts are around 5-10 secs before changing to the next advert. But in the settings it only goes down to 1 fps and the lowest any advice on slowing the speed down or is it not possible?
Cheers, Ian.

[AndiS]

I have no practical experience with that but I would have assumed that you need a pretty long animation in the 3D package anyway.

I.e., you do nothing for 5 frames, then move the UV points in 1 frame, then make no changes again for 5 frames, then another change in 1 frame.

And then you play that at 1 frame per second. Or so I would try.

[Class1987]

Ok, thanks for the help I do have this one issue with the texture one side is a bit dark and the other side is black, now I know the normals haven't flipped because you can see the polygon. So I'm not sure what's happened here, I'm assuming it might the the DDS setting I have saved it as 8.8.8.8 ARGB unsigned with 1 MIP map, does it need to higher or do I have it on the wrong settings, I have an image any advice?
Cheers, Ian.

[AndiS]

Try rotating this stand so the other side is lit - or check at another time of day when the sun lights it.

It might have to do with Ambient Occlusion aka lightmap. You may be puzzled about this as your shader should be Tex so it does shine at night. But maybe it is not.

It might depend on your graphics settings inside the game, too. Anyway I found that if your lightmap is black and there is no direct light, then the object is black, or almost if there is strong ambient light defined in the weather blueprint.

The other line of investigation would be whether the left-hand side is not 100% identical to the right-hand side by some mistake in the model. But I cannot help there and I would dig through the above first.

[Class1987]

Right I tried changing from TexDiff to Tex but it failed to export in the blueprint editor I was wondering if the MIP maps on the DDS export would make a difference by changing the number of the MIP maps but not really. I used the TrainBasicObjectDiffuse that brightened the texture up but no animation on the texture, mmmmm strange at this current time only TexDiff works animation but I'll keep trying all the other shaders and see if I can get one that will work.

[Class1987]

Anybody got any advice with a shader that will fix this issue?