Animated crossfade not working... again.

[SonyBoy]

Chaos, you need to fix this issue. I am again wasting time trying to get a simple layered texture to crossfade with two keyframes. This should work. The "official" workaround is to use a color constant. I'm also finding this does not work, whether plugged into the mask or the opacity attribute of the layered texture. Testing this -- which requires batch rendering each time because the crossfade WORKS EXCEPT DURING BATCH RENDER -- is ridiculously time consuming.

This is really a very basic expectation -- that any keyable attributes will be correctly evaluated at render time. This is Maya world. If the renderer can't do it, it shouldn't be keyable and this problem has been around since forever.

[hermit.crab]

I'll ping the product owner about it again. Otherwise, it works fine if you key the colorConstant and use it as a Mask (check the attached scene).

[SonyBoy]

Thanks. I'd like to see this fixed properly so this workaround isn't necessary. Failing that, a second best would be the implementation of an animatable attribute added to the layered texture that replicates the color constant setup, either explicitly or which just has the same effect under the hood.

The confusion largely comes from having both the mask and the opacity attributes on each layer, which while I can see have their needs actually doesn't make sense with this workaround when wanting to crossfade -- the opacity is clearly the more intuitive attribute of the two to want to use, yet the workaround requires plugging to "Mask" which is an RGB channel.

[SonyBoy]

Still not seeing the results I want with this technique. With a color constant set up as the mask in exactly the same way that you have it, the result from the layered texture with the mask at 0 is different to what I get if I plug the texture map into the shader directly (in other words, this is not really an animation issue now, but that the layered texture itself does not seem to be returning the same result as the throughput texture).

What could cause a layered texture to output a different result to a directly connected texture file.

[hermit.crab]

Still not seeing the results I want with this technique. With a color constant set up as the mask in exactly the same way that you have it, the result from the layered texture with the mask at 0 is different to what I get if I plug the texture map into the shader directly (in other words, this is not really an animation issue now, but that the layered texture itself does not seem to be returning the same result as the throughput texture).

What could cause a layered texture to output a different result to a directly connected texture file.

I can't reproduce this. Mind if you attach a simple scene and some screenshots of the differences?

[SonyBoy]

This actually turned out to be user error -- a roughness map that needed inverting had not been.