Animating a screen/display. Any pointers?

[RRIS]

Hi all,

For a project here I need to animate an object that has a display on it. The display is showing a couple of steps (think user instructions) and in some of the steps, it cycles repeatedly between two different images (imagine an icon or text that switches between two different states).

I'm trying to come to grips with how to animate this display. I have images/textures for everything, but I'm wondering if it's not the easiest to just render the animation first in a low-res, then use this to create a separate animation movie for all the display states and then re-render the scene with the screen animation as a texture?
I'm not sure if what I want is do-able with number/color fade tools in the material editor?

Any ideas/suggestions?

[theAVator]

is there other movement going on while the screen image switching is taking place? Like is the object itself moving or anything in the background? Or is the only true animated part the stuff on screen?

There might be a few different ways, but it sorta depends on what else is going on in the scene.

You could render it out normally with only 1 state shown, and then use the ability to render frames to cherry pick certain spots where you want the other screen to be shown and only render those additional small parts and then just cut them into the whole animation from earlier.

If you're just looking at a screen and want them to switch out and nothing else is going on, you can just render stills and cut them in over a period of time in the rendered animation.

Alternatively, I think you could also use region render to render a certain region of the animation that contains the screen and just cut it in to the finished animation. This depends more on the complexity of what's going on.

[mattjgerard]

Big question here is, are you able to work the animation in another program like After Effects, Premiere or even Photoshop can do some rudimentary timeline based animation stuff? Or do you need to complete this all within Keyshot?

[RRIS]

Those are all good points, thanks for clarifying.

The object will move during the animation, and so will the camera. The display is behind glass, so there will be reflections on top of it. This makes me think that adding the screen animations in post with AE will be a bit too much of a hassle.

With your comments, I now think the easiest to do is to render out all the screen animations for the duration of the final animation and then apply that as a texture when I re-render the animation on the final resolution.