CompuServe Messages

I just picked up 3DSr3. I have been doing Broadcast animation for six years using PC's, Truevision products and, yes, competitors to 3DS. Needless to say, I am not use to asking dumb questions about computer animation, but 3DSr3 got me this time. I thought rotoscoping was a built in feature of 3DSr3 and was pretty much straight forward. Am I missing something here? I need to put a live action effect on a 3DS object. At present I have a FLC that is 2 sec.'s long that is loopable for a 4 1/2 sec. that is needed for the animation. I prefer to leave is as a FLC, but I can convert it to TGA's if necessary. My question is that I only found one reference to rotoscoping in the manuals and that was in the Advance User Guide. Since I already have the frames, I will, as they say be "rotoscoping" from "disk". The "rotoscoping" mention in the guide was for grabbing video from tape. I was able to map the object as a texture and an opacity map from the FLC, but will the texture animate or will it just be the first frame of the FLC. I need the opacity map becuase the final animation has to have the alpha information generated by the black in the original FLC. The alpha is required to be split off as a traveling mat for the animation that will be reused over and over in a video post situation (tape machines, video swithers and keyers to be precise). Any help would be appreciated. Hey Greg, thanks for everything. Thank Ray for me too. Maybe you could give me your two cents worth <bg>. Seeing how 3DS arrived Friday, I would like to see how fast I can turn this around into a software that pays for itself. Actually I have a deadline on a project. I need to know if 3DS can handle this straight forward effect, pronto. Thanks, Bryce Whiteside CF/X Image, Inc.