Flipbook
Plugin to animate Substance Designer graphs for Quake textures.
Installation
Open Designer and create a new package or open an existing one.
Select Tools > Plugin Manager.
Click the Install button and select the sd-flipbook.sdplugin file.
If any graph views are open, close them and then re-open them.
Configuration
A new "Flipbook" menu button should appear in the graph view.
Click on it, then select "Configure".
From here you can configure the number of frames to export, whether to prefix digits or letters, and where to export the frames and under what format.
Using animated parameters
Upon export of frames, two parameters will be created, frameNum and frameFrac. frameFrac can be used with the Get Float node and frameNum can be used with the Get Int node from function graphs.
frameFrac represents a fraction of the time span animated over as a number between 0 and 1. If there are 4 frames in the animation, it will be given the value of 0.0, 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75 in sequence.
frameNum is the exact frame number, starting with 0 (e.g. the first frame has value 0, the second frame 1, etc.)
Exporting frames
Make sure your Substance graph has at least one Output node that is driven by one or more animated function graphs.
When all else is set, select "Export frames" from the Flipbook menu; Designer will become unresponsive while rendering. Check the console for output: errors will appear in red, while lines describing which frame is being rendered and what path each frame is written to should appear on success.
To use with Quake, you'll need to import the exported frames via TexMex,qpakman, etc. into a WAD file.
Tips
Prefer using the frameFrac parameter over the frameNum parameter for things like scrolling textures, as frameFrac scales with adjustments to the total frame count. frameNum is more useful for things like blinking lights,where only 1 frame is on, or odd frames are on and even frames are off.
After running export for the first time, "frameFunc" and "frameNum" become visible in the in the Properties window as "INPUT PARAMETERS". Scrub the default value slider to preview how the animation will appear.
If running Export frames after having saved your project, the project will be left in a "dirty" state (you'll be asked to save when closing the project). Do not worry, nothing significant was changed. The only change that occurs is that the value of the input parameters are modified each frame, then restored to their original value.
Etc.
Repository: https://codeberg.org/4LT/sd-flipbook
