Blender: How to Loop an Image Sequence into Textures

Animated textures in Blender is a thing! Immediately after finding that out, I set out to script a grid crawler texture in Processing. Because no one in their right mind would want to draw that by hand.

A Bit Of Everything has a post with the logic for a static grid, but somehow getting an animated version ate 3 hours of my life. All in all, it took about 12 tries. What I love  about Processing is that even bad guesses can have pleasing results.

This thing below. That’s all I wanted. Animated grid lines. Wierdly satisfying, right?

The script is actually not that complicated. It can be done with three variables, a while loop, and a for loop.

The Processing Code

Couple things to note here. Setting the X or Y increment to a higher number will give you a more spaced apart grid. Also, you have to update the file path. Using the variable i will ensure that Processing doesn’t save over the same image over and over again.

int x = 0;
int y = 0;
int i = 0;

void setup(){
size(700, 700);
background(255);
strokeWeight(1);
stroke(0, 0, 0);
}

void draw() {
while(y<701){
for (int x=0; x<701; x=x+50){
line(x, 0, x, y);
line(0, y, x, y);
save("C:\\Users\\Desktop\\Test" + str(i) + ".png");
i++;
}
y=y+50;
}
}

How to Add the Texture in Blender

The images need to be numbered sequentially for this to work. Start off by adding your object. Unwrap it and assign it a new material.Then go into the Node Editor and add an image texture.

In the image texture node, click Open. Navigate to the folder that contains the images you want to use, highlight them all, and click Open Image.

If all has gone well, you should now see a fifth box set to “Image Sequence.” Below that, you’ll see the number of frames you have loaded. And that’s it. Hit play. Watch it move.