CompuServe Messages

We've run into that problem as well. Apparently, MAGIC4 uses the wrong value from 3DS as its "current frame" counter, using instead a "current FIELD" counter. A possible workaround might entail enabling FIELD-NO-DOUBLE in 3DS.SET (r"4" only), but that's a pain when you have several network slaves and only want to do it for a few projects, as it means bringing down all the slaves and bringing them back up with the appropriate SET= parameter on the command line — tedious indeed when you normally don't even have keyboards and monitors connected to the slaves! Also, FIELD-NO-DOUBLE has its own problem (notably, it does not work with .IFL files the way it should). A better workaround is the one someone suggested to the .IFL problem mentioned above. It does what FIELD-NO-DOUBLE _should_ do, and it works with r3 as well as r"4." You need to create a B&W bitmap file in any format 3DS accepts (.GIF, .TIF, or RLE-compressed .BMP recommended, .TGA and .JPG will work but those are wasteful of disk space in this case) that consists solely of alternate black and white scan lines going all the way across the screen. All odd-numbered lines should be white, and all even-numbered ones should be black. It should be the size you usually render to (756×486 if you render to a PAR or VISTA, for instance). If you use several different horizontal resolutions but only one vertical resolution you can make only one and allow 3DS to scale it, but that will slow this down a bit. You only need to make this file once. Call it "ODDFIELD.???" where ".???" is the appropriate extension for the bitmap file type. Now Time/Scale your animation to 2x its designed size, or design it around 60fps instead of 30fps from the beginning. Set up a Video Post queue to use a length of [Use KF] + 1 (e.g. if your original animation was 5 seconds long and thus 150 frames at 30fps, and you Time/Scaled it to 300 frames, your Video Post queue must be 301 frames long). Set up two lines in your queue as follows (here assuming 20 frames): Queue Alpha Trans 0 10 20 [KF Scene] ODDFIELD.??? *—————-* [KF Scene] ODDFIELD.??? *—————-* The Alpha box for ODDFIELD.??? should be set to [Queue RGB] with Opacity Threshhold of [255] on both, and have the Modifiers [Negative] button set on ONE of them (which one depends on the proper setting of FIELD-ORDER for your video equipment — use trial-and-error to determine the proper value). Now Render from Video Post, All frames, with Render Nth Frame set to [2]! Voila! Field-rendering done RIGHT with one KF frame per field, no interpolation, .IFLs handled correctly (one per field, not one per frame), and MAGIC4.APX should also handle it correctly since we're now dealing with one field per KF Frame, not two.