#Interface with Windows?
12 messages in this thread
I am considering purchasing 3D Studio, but since all of my development is in
Windows and 3D Studio is DOS based, I am wondering if/how animations developed
in 3D Studio interface with Windows-based authoring packages (Director, etc.)
as well as with Visual Basic.
We use 3DS to generate animations for VB all the time, Cydney. There are a
couple of FLC .DLLs out there and at least one VBX that will allow you to
easily embed the animation as well as control all the various frame playing,
etc.
The other options are to take the FLC and convert it to AVI (which we've done,
using Corel) or to make an AVI from the TGA frames generated in 3DS. Quite
frankly, I wouldn't want to do animations any other way than 3DS, and the
results interfaced with VB are spectacular.
Mike–
I read your note of March 5 to Cydney re: playing .FLC files on VB in Windows,
and hope you may have a thought or 2 about my problem:
I'm developing a program in VB that plays .FLC files against a .BMP background,
using the Autodesk .VBX and .DLL files. My program is designed to run in 256
colors. Unfortunately, this leads to distortion of the screen colors ("palatte
flashing") when the .FLC plays, even tho the .FLC and the .BMP use the same
palatte. Brian, from Autodesk and on this forum, opines that this is a known
problem and we're all stuck with it, due to the way .FLC files interface with
the system palatte in Windows. My problem goes away if I step up to 64K colors,
but for this application I need to write it for just 256.
Can you help me out here? Have any ideas?
Thanks,
–Bill
Animations should be made that do not use either the first ten or the last ten
colors of the Windows palette — these are reserved and the use of them will
cause "flashing".
To correctly generate FLCs which reserve these colors, use the following in
your 3DS.SET file:
;Sets the number of colors used to generate flics. The default is 256, but
; you can reduce this to 236 for flics intended for playback under Windows.
FLIC-COLORS = 236
Everything will be fine then.
Since they moved this thread to another forum, I hadn't checked to see if my
message got posted through to you, but did you understand how to fix your
problem with the flickering palette (namely, editing your 3DS.SET file for 236
colors?)
If you have existing FLCs to convert you can always use them as a background
and rerender.
Mike–
Thanks for checking up on me.
Yes, I got your note. I'm actually using Animator Pro rather than 3D studio,
but have tried your suggestion of using <236 colors and leaving the bottom and
top 10 slots free. The .FLC plays fine, but if I run it against a background
the contains a multicolored bitmap (consisting of more that just Windows'
system colors) I still get palette flashing, even if the bitmap uses the same
palette. I guess the key is to keep the background simple, but that seems a
ridiculous solution.
–Bill
>but if I run it against a background the contains a multicolored bitmap
(consisting >of more that just Windows' system colors) I still get palette
flashing
This is a VB app? So, are you using a Picture control with the multicolored
bitmap? If so, I can run some tests here under similar circumstances.
>>This is a VB app? So, are you using a Picture control with the multicolored
bitmap? If so, I can run some tests here under similar circumstances. <<
Great! This is a VB app with a multicolored bitmap background and a .flc
running in the Autodesk VBplay.vbx box on top of the bitmap. The .flc and the
bitmap use the same palette, about 225 colors, leaving the top 10 and bottom 10
slots open, and using a 256 color video driver. The bitmap could be in a
picture box, image box, or a form. It seems that if either the .flc or the .bmp
uses only the Windows system colors (of which I think there are 20 when in 256
color mode), then everything is OK. Problems arise when both the .flc anf the
.bmp use a more colorful palette.
–Bill
We're going to try and duplicate this problem tommorrow — it has my chief
software engineer intrigued (although the stuff we do doesn't come up with this
scenerio, it might someday).
He also suggested that if you could upload a sample image and FLC you are
having trouble with it might help, but let's see what happens tommorrow.
Mike–
Got your latest notes re: the problem of running a .flc against a .bmp
background. I have experimented with your suggestions and am making some
progress. I find that even if both (the .flc and .bmp) have the same palette,
minor flashing occurs–maybe just evident because I'm using a 486 and you have
a Pentium with a fast video card. I wish Autodesk would give this a little
thought (color indexing) to help us out in dealing with Windows.
I hope/think you're right about 256 colors going the way of 80MB hard drives.
I'm much happier in 64K colors.
Thanks for the input and all your help.
–Bill
>> I find that even if both (the .flc and .bmp) have the same palette, minor
flashing occurs- <<
Have you tried it on a computer with a different video card? just a thought…
– Steve Ormonde
>>how do 3DS animations interface with VB, etc…
No problem. The animations themselves are non-denominational. They don't care
if a DOS, Windows, or other program is playing them.
JKJ