Re: Sprites, Camera Rotations, and Images: aka Fake 3D

I think you're half out of luck, Clear. :(

As far as I know, you simply can't use movie-type textures on sprites. You can only use single images, or image sequences.

Also, since movie compression is designed to work when movies are played linearly from start to finish, it wouldn't be nearly as efficient for this sort of task. Typically, Maya doesn't deal with highly compressed movie files at all for just this reason.

That said, image sequences might represent a viable workaround for you, depending on what your eventual needs are.

What you would do is render out your turntable views into an image sequence, like car0000.tif (view from 0 degrees vertical, 0 degrees around) to car1035.tif (view from maximum degrees vertical, 350 degrees around). Then you'd use vector math to calculate a 'direction to camera' value for each particle (I don't think the direction of the camera itself would matter?), and then pass that value on to the 'Sprite Num' attribute of the particle so that it would choose the appropriate image from the sequence.

Good luck...

-Steve

P.S. I just had a thought... if you're dead-set on using a movie as opposed to an image sequence, you could MAYBE instance a geometrical plane to each particle, thus making your own sprites... then use the Movie texture on the surface of that geometry, and drive the movie frame number based on the angle to the camera. I don't know if that would even work properly... you'll have to experiment.