Can you tell an image sequence when it should start playing?

Question

In my animation I gave a short image sequence of an explosion. The image sequence is 25 frames long. My problem is that I don't want the image sequence to play until frame 120 of the blender project (ie the blender project is 400 frames long, at frame 120 I want the image sequence to start playing its 25 frames).

I cant simply loop the image sequence because the timing is off (ie by frame 120 of the blender project, the image sequence is off by 5 frames). I've tried the usual trickery of setting the offset of the sequence, but then I get 5 purple frames). I was hoping there was a node that allows me to specify when the image sequence should start playing, but I haven't found one yet.

Any suggestions are welcome!

• Jeff

Answer 1

It's not difficult, you just need to understand the start & offset meanings in a Image Texture, Sequence node in the Shader Editor. First add a node Texture :: Image Texture:

Then select any of the images in the sequence. Once you've done this, you'll be able to select the Sequence from the Single Image drop-down:

I also fix up the image reference to be 'img ####' instead of a specific image (like "img 0000". I then enter the number of frames that will be rendered by this scene & blend file.

For Start Frame, I enter the scene's frame where I want to rendered images to start to increment, pulling in subsequent frame images..

For Offset I might enter sometime other than 1 if I do not want to start the animation from the "img 0000" image.

If you do not want the "0000"th image to appear before you're Start Frame, You'd also need to animate the rendering to disable before your desired start frame. Here I did it inside the material shader nodes with a Math (Multiply) node (right click and add keyframe for the value you want at the frame you want:

Or you could animate the Render in the Outliner: