CompuServe Messages

#ANIMATOR questions

    04-May-94 13:33:16
Sb: #ANIMATOR questions
Fm: Dennis Conklin 75020,2746
To: all
I have a couple of beginners questions about ANIMATOR (NOT AniPro) 1) I am having pallette management problems. I have a flick that uses very few colors, most objects are painted using Vgrad and Hgrad using a ping ponged series of grays to get a metallic cylinder effect. When I compress the pallette only about 56 colors are used (the rest are blacked out after compress and the picture is fine). Next I read in a different, picture that I want to use as a background as a pic in frame two. After adjusting the picture to get the colors right I compress the pallette for it and it only uses about 130 colors (the rest are blacked out after the compress, and the picture looks fine). At this point I assumed that I could use One Pallette to combine the two pallettes and everything would be fine (56 + 130 is 180 colors, so the pallettes should combine fine without any fitting of colors needed). Well when I do this, the fine shades of gray shading of the original flick is ruined. The individual shades (which were dithered originally for a smooth transition) stand out dramatically, so instead of a smooth shading I get bands of gray. Why didn't this work, and more importantly, what can I do to combine these with better results??? 2) I have seen numerous references to inter-object constraints in AniPro (lots of it) and 3DS (not as good constraint). Since I haven't stumbled on this in ANIMATOR, should I assume that it was added later in AniPro, or is it just undocumented in ANIMATOR, or am I just confused. Thanks for any tips!!