CompuServe Messages

>> Always suspected you were a little unconventional! 🙂 I was shooting for a grad that changed color from green to red as it grew which my test did. HOWEVER, as the grad is revealing itself it is indeed also stretching at the same time. Although it may be useful in another way, (and to confirm your suspicion) this technique would NOT work for multiple states at different levels. So… To get the effect EXACTLY as needed, linear, with 50% growth equal to half the grad map, I would use an animated opacity map. After talking with Bob he mentioned there may be some 10 different levels using 4 major color groups. I went into Ani Pro and created 10 different animated cels consisting of growing white bars. One bar grew from 0 to 100 units, the next to 90 units, 80 units, and so on. Each cel MUST be clipped at the highth of the 100 unit cel. These were saved as 100.cel, 90.cel, etc. Then in the 3DS I created materials with the grads as texture maps and the animated cels as opacity maps. Then all the states are created at the highest level (100% scale) and the opacity map does the scaling. The object will reveal itself and the grad in a totally linear way. I believe with a combination of opacity and texture maps the project would be managable in this way. Heck, if you did enough of these types of graphs you could have a library of opacity maps at all percentages. With the list of states, grad color group, and percent growth in front of you it will go rather quickly… with no keyframming! What do you think? Maybe a script could be created to handle this, a sort of Corel Chart for 3DS? Ralph