Hello, In blender it is possible to map movie files in addition to image files to objects as materials. Is this possible in Houdini? I guess an example would be having an object in a room that represents a TV and running a movie image on the objects screen.

Cheers
Eric

There currently is no support for movie files as a texture map source in Houdini although that would be very cool. You have to convert the movie to discrete images with some 3rd party utility. Mplay can currently only author movie files from image sequences. I don't know how efficient this would be in the end. All texture maps are converted internally to .rat texture files and that can take some time with lots of texture maps when rendering with Mantra.

If you don't know, file paths can use html url addresses so if this feature were to be implemented, you could watch web linked movies in Houdini but all those codec's to support…

Just for fun, in any web browser, find a link to a .jpg image and then copy/paste that url in any image file path in Houdini. Say the background filename in the display options dialog.
I have used this to cycle through a bunch of images from various websites.

I figured. Thank youfor the prompt reply.

You have to bring in a sequence of images by frame number into your material. It's a pain but it works.

Using a File node inside of IMG Component.
Put this in the file field to reference a sequence of stills:

pictureName`padzero(4,$F)`.png

Inside a Point SOP, you can add color referencing the image sequence using a pic expression.

pic(“/img/img1/img_out”, $BBX, $BBY, CR)
pic(“/img/img1/img_out”, $BBX, $BBY, CG)
pic(“/img/img1/img_out”, $BBX, $BBY, CB)

Not sure if this is all correct but should get you close.