Repeating pattern relating to transform

Hello everyone so I’ll quickly go over the problem I have on here since I have been researching and trying things for an hour (before specific people may ask, yes I am new I just started using natron yesterday).

So I’m making a fire effect with senoise masking and have the fire be animated by moving senoise upwards with transform. This is for something I’ll need as asset so it’ll need to smoothly repeat every 50 frames (I decided that 50 frames would be enough for optimization concerns) however I couldnt find a way to do this, I tried tiling which didnt work and also made the effect way worse and bruteforcing it just seems highly impractical so I decided to ask for help in here.

Please, if you can, suggest the more simple solutions first as I’m still getting used to this kind of asset creation.

A simple solution would be to use rotation instead of translate. -180 rotation and +180 rotation are the same. so if you do -180 rotation on first frame and + 180 rotation on the last frame, you have a looping animation.
So you’ll just need to figure out how to make the fire effect with rotation now…

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I wanted to see if there was a shorter solution as I’ve considered that as brute force to merge 3 noises that are cut and rotated like you said. But I think I’ll just do this since there isnt really any other way since this seems to be the simplest solution as you said, thanks for making that clear.

There are many other ways but most of them require the use of expressions. Usually the way you’d do looping animations is to set 3 keyframes: the first and last frames would have the same key and a middle one would be different, so the animation starts and stops at the same place. However this method is fine for looping most stuff but not for something like fire using a noise because the middle keyframe would result in a stop or peak after which the animation starts to go in reverse towards the last frame (10 → 5 → 10). So for what you’re trying to do, I think rotation is the simplest way to achieve it.

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