What I want to do is have a material that responds to sound. Specifically the mod I’m working on (www.chaoticdreams.org) Has these little smiling robot bombs that talk smack and chase you around. The effect I’d like to achieve would be for the eyes and mouth of the proxy mines to light up based on the audio so it looks like they are talking to you. I’m sure I could fake the effect, but I’d really like it to fade in and out as the audio goes up and down.
So I guess my question would be if it’s possible to drive material parameters with an audio file somehow.
If you didn’t want to use a plugin, for whatever reason, then you could simulate the effect with a curve and feed that into a dynamic material instance parameter. Then, you would have to manually (that’s the lame part) map the peaks and troughs of the curve to the audio.
I suppose if you opened the graphical representation of the audio, you could mimic the waveform directly.
The other obvious downside is the necessity to make a curve for every piece of audio… I’ll let you decide whether that’s worth it or not!
I did something similar to emulate blinking on one of my characters. If you need more info, then I’d be happy to provide it!
