CompuServe Thread

#Great POCO stuff!!

11 messages in this thread
#103772From: dave aguilarMay 24, 1994 7:12 PM
/* I've been looking at your POCO routines. I'm impressed! It'll be nice to have more POCO routines available. There are very few now. */ I moved this to the Animator Pro forum… 🙂 Thank you very much! /* I think POCO would be used more if it had functions for all AniPro comands. When I first tried POCO I found that I couldn't Stretch a cel, for example. I didn't even look at POCO for months after that. It's really a shame because it is so easy to use! */ Stretching a cel is not as intuitive as accomplishing other cel manipulations in the CEL pull down. Turning, moving… all internal functions, but stretching involves optics stuff… and a lot of folks don't know about pointers and structures requires to use OPTICS.H. That's not straight forward stuff for the novice C programmer. /* Do you have a routine that does a Cel-Clip? */ We have a number of routines which do various types of clipping. I was hoping to get some response on FRAMSCAL and CSPRAY before I uploaded more goodies though. We have one particularly useful one called CELROT which achieves some incredible images. I also thought I'd upload CRATER, a bump map for creating moons, asteroids, etc. Neat stuff. And I just barely mentioned the image browser to Nik yesterday… a windows/IPAS (type interface for ANI… oooooohhh! 🙂 /* Have you tried doing inks? I would like to know what's involved. */ You mean have I created new inks? Not yet. Full control over ink specification and application, but I haven't created an ink yet… I don't think Mark or Greg have either. -dave
#103860From: Dennis ConklinMay 25, 1994 7:22 AM
Dave, I have CELSPRAY and it is really cool – good work! I am new to all this, but I have just UL'ed MAKETW, which is a autotrace for making outlines of filled shapes (like text) into tweens. Check it out when they put it online.
#103948From: dave aguilarMay 25, 1994 3:05 PM
/* Dave, I have CELSPRAY and it is really cool – good work! I am new to all this, but I have just UL'ed MAKETW, which is a autotrace for making outlines of filled shapes (like text) into tweens. Check it out when they put it online. */ Thanks for the compliment, and what a cool idea Dennis (MAKETW)…I will download it today. What a practical implementation… be intersting how you did your boundary condition surveys… you're talking a mini raster to vector converter here you know. 🙂 -dave
#103980From: Dennis ConklinMay 25, 1994 6:42 PM
They say that idiots usually provide the simplest solution to any given problem! MAKETW is definitely that – a boundary survey so simplistic that it doesn't even deserve the name!
#104305From: Nik Grant [adesk]May 27, 1994 8:20 AM
"MAKETW, which is a autotrace for making outlines of filled shapes" Dennis, this is really neat! I "autotraced" text, per your suggestion, and it was great. There was a peculiar thing that happened though, and perhaps you can reproduce it. I loaded MRNUMO.FLC (sample Flic) and clicked on the torso as Start and the legs as End. The tweening which took place happened as 2 dots on the left side of the margin. I was running 640×480 and MRNUMO was a smaller 320×200 box in the middle of the screen – in case that makes any difference. The hollow effect looked correct. A wishlist item: The MAKETW provides a dialogue for Start, which disappears before I can make an End selection. I would like to see the ability to have the dialog easily accessible for an End selection, when needed. This tracing almost seems miraculous! Thanks for thinking of it.
#104453From: Dennis ConklinMay 27, 1994 7:53 PM
"MAKETW, which is a autotrace for making outlines of filled shapes" Thanks for the comments. As I originally said, I wrote this one night when I got tired of tracing letters – I didn't (and don't) consider it tested beyond being BETA at this point. I fixed the problem with the tween being over to the left for MRNUMO – it turned out I was checking for a color match with the CURRENT color to find the boundary, instead of the CLICKED color. It so happens, that it still works for my "make a letter, then tween it" approach, which is all I ever used it for. I also added the loop you wanted (thanks for the input – it's much better with the loop!). Now it comes around to the menu again until you select EXIT from the menu or right click on the screen while the menu is showing. The new version was just UL'ed to MKTW12.zip. Now for the bad news – although the new version doesn't put the tween for MRNUMO off to the left, you probably won't like what it does for most of his parts anyway – this is exactly the kind of detailed shape that MAKETWN can't handle – the single pixel lines in the shape, plus the single pixel border to another shape of the same color tend to confuse it. Oh well, I guess I'm NOT smart enough to write the ultimate tracer – it's crude alright, but still plenty useful. For a good example of it's flaws try doing the head inMRNUMO – if you click to the left of the "1", the outline of the whole head is tweened, and when it is filled the "1" is wiped out. If you click to the right of the "1" you get a tween which is a one pixel outline of the "1", the "1" is filled in with the head color, and the head is left hollow. The good news is that by separately tweening the two shapes, you could do something like tween the "1" in the head to a "2" in a star, for example. There are some other things I have thought to add like the ability to delete or "thin" nodes in polys – these become necessary because MAKETWN uses a LOT of nodes, but due to my lack of time and my unfamiliarity with POCO, it will probably be quite a while before I do any of that. You should probably release v1.2 for use rather than wait, unless you come up with some other tweak you want implemented. I will leave a separate message for the POCO experts help on stuff I'm doing for the node editor. I better quit – this is too long!!!
#104466From: Dennis ConklinMay 27, 1994 9:34 PM
Nik – I am having a terrible day! Can you believe that TWO separate computers at work burned out their I/O boards on the same day? What are the odds of that – and guess who got to fix them. On top of that, I think I UL'ed the wrong version of MAKETWN a little while ago – OK the LASTEST is UL'ed in MKT12A.ZIP – can you just replace MKTW12 with this so I don't have to redo the description, etc. Thanks, sorry for the confusion but it's been like that all day! Dennis
#104859From: Nik Grant [adesk]May 31, 1994 7:45 AM
"I am having a terrible day!" Yeow! Sorry to hear about your troubles! However, I am looking forward to seeing your work on the latest ("A") version of the MAKETW file. This seems like a wonderful program, thanks. Nik
#104531From: Dennis ConklinMay 28, 1994 8:40 AM
Nik, please see my message #104466 in this thread, which was intended for you but got addressed to me (from me).
#103874From: charles jamesonMay 25, 1994 8:49 AM
Dave, I really like it that CELSPRAY works with all the inks! (Darken, scrape, glass, etc.) Chuck Jameson Silver Tongue Software
#103949From: dave aguilarMay 25, 1994 3:05 PM
/* I really like it that CELSPRAY works with all the inks! (Darken, scrape, glass, etc.) */ Glad to hear it's working correctly! Have you had a chance to try Nik's ability (spanning the effect over multiple frames for a "cumulative effect" yet?) in the program (incremental option). -dave