CompuServe Messages

>>green to red… You made me think some more. (Yikes, stop that! <g>) A simple solid color change may be a good alternative to a gradient for many types of animated information charts, especially where there are a number of data elements and the population can be fit into discrete colored bins, such as yellow=60-70%, orange=70-80%, etc. For plots like Bob's animated US map, this might even be more effective since it may reduce the visual clutter. (And a LOT easier to produce!) >>opacity maps revealing gradient… I considered animated maps, but one problem I've had whenever I tried opacity maps that revealed a 3D object is the end of the object doesn't look good (i.e., doesn't look clean and flat). Except from a side view, it just looks like a slightly fuzzy end of an open tube. The fuzziness decreased with increasing map resolution, but the object always looked hollow. Am I doing something wrong? In the case of revealing a long tubular object I once resorted to creating a solid plug animated to match the end – a bit of a pain in the neck! In the case of Bob's scaling states, do you know of a good way to show the flat surface of each state that changes color to match the top of a gradient revealed by an an opacity map? A separate, flat, state object animated (translated) for each state? I thought about creating a animated gradient to be applied as a texture map and sync'd with the scaling, but that would be a REAL chore with 50 of these things going at once! Unfortuately, none of this helps the generic case of coloring an arbitrary animated object (such as a mathematical surface or a terrain) with a gradient or other map that remains fixed to the world coordinate system. A special problem is where parts (local peaks) of the same object scale at different rates. The need for variations of this kind of plot come up all the time. I had one plot of the light intensity from a dual-concentric fiber optic where I wanted to show how the light output changed over time. This was sort of a two color (green-red) gradient where the peak of the plot changed to red as it rose. This worked OK with morphing, but the plot was pretty simple. I'll try to run down the status of the beta gradient SXP since it works very well with an AXP'd object (that is, until the powers fix the AXP mapping coordinate "feature"!) So far, however, I think the grid projected from a spotlight may be one of the least undesirable methods. <g> Didn't someone recently write a procedural colorer with TSE or IPAS? Is anyone up to writing a (data-driven?!) procedural colorizer that will produce fixed, user-specified blended AND discrete gradients and does not rely on object mapping coordinates? JKJ PS: thanks for all your input on this subject, Ralph. I always thought of you as a creative, artistic genius, on a plain far above this low-life science/engineering stuff. <G>