Changing frames used in animated image texture?

[bentway23]

Probably a stupid question--I have a two-frame image sequence for a texture, with frames 1 and 2 in the file names. If I see them at frames 1 and 2 of the shot, they work as expected. I don't want them to switch until frame 357, though, and none of the frame override fields seem to be doing anything--I think I've tried every option and number except ping-pong and frames 1 and 2 are great but everything is black afterwards. (I don't want to convert this to a 900-frame image sequence of just two images.) I assume it'd be range, start 1, offset 356, speed 1, length 2, but I can't get those or any other combo to work. Any help is appreciated.

[bdancer]

I guess you could hack this by adding geometry attribute like <my_frame> (of type string) and set it to whatever value you need and then use this tag instead of frame tag in the image file path.

[bentway23]

Where would I reference that in the image node? How would that be different than the many, many numbers I've been manually typing in?

[bdancer]

> Where would I reference that in the image node?

In the file name, e.g. texture_<my_frame>.png

> How would that be different than the many, many numbers I've been manually typing in?

You don't need to type many many numbers, you could use attrwrangler/VEX adding primitive attr:

if ($FF == 1 || $FF == 2) {
    s@my_frame = "00${FF}";
}
else if ($FF < 357) {
    s@my_frame = "002";
}
else {
    s@my_frame = "001";
}​

You'll also need to force "my_frame" attribute via "V-Ray Object Properties".

[bentway23]

Perfect, thanks! I was crashing at first, but found out that trick apparently doesn't work with GPU rendering. (That's okay, CPU is actually faster for this project anyway.)