CompuServe Messages

Jonas, The PAR Driver operates in two output modes. In its default mode, you "see" the files in their native PAR format (*.STL for stills and *.ANI for animation). By that I mean that if you do a DIR of the PAR drive you would see a bunch of files with either STL or ANI extensions. This mode is used primarily for backup. When you copy a file out of the PAR into another media, you will be copying a PAR native format file, or, in other words, you would get the file exactly as it is saved in the PAR drive. The second mode of operation is what I called TARGA mode. In this mode, when you do a DIR all you get is TGA files. The physical data itself never changes. It's just when you copy the files out of the PAR into your hard disk that the files get converted from PAR native format back to Targa format. Besides the "Export Mode" option, there is a "Frame Number" option. This is necessary in order to address a specific frame in an animation. There are three possible modes of operation. "Do Nothing" mode, the default, will give you only the first frame of the animation. "Automatic Increment" will give you the current frame and each subsequent read the following frames. This means if you, for instance, were to type: COPY P:\MYANIM.TGA C:\IMAGES\FRAME000.TGA COPY P:\MYANIM.TGA C:\IMAGES\FRAME001.TGA COPY P:\MYANIM.TGA C:\IMAGES\FRAME002.TGA Each FRAME??? would have the appropriate frame sequence. Working this way, all you need to do is to tell 3D Studio to use that "Targa" file as a map or whatever. Each time 3D Studio will read that file it would receive a new frame. This is also interesting when using Aldus Gallery effects with a script. As you can't give a new file name each time, you just run the exact same script over and over. Each time Gallery effects reads an image out of the PAR it gets a new frame. It is possible to tell the driver which frame is going to be the next frame at any point in time. So, for instance, if you want to do the above but you want to start at frame 50, you would tell the driver the next frame is 50. When the "automatic" increment reaches the end of the animation it wraps around back to Zero. The third mode of operation is "Get the Frame Number from the Filename". In this mode, I will take a look at the last (up to) 4 digits of the given filename and extract a number from it. I will use that as the frame number. For instance, if the animation is named ANIM0000.TGA and you type: COPY P:\ANIM0049.TGA C:\IMAGES You would be copying the 50th frame of the animation (0000 is the first frame unlike 3D Studio's Keyframer numbering system! <g>). This is the mode to use when an IFL file is used. It allows you to read the frames in any order you want. All of these modes and flags and parameters are accessible either through command line options or from within 3D Studio. Along with the package you get a PXP which functions as a little control panel for the PAR driver. Coffee anyone?