CompuServe Thread

HELP!! We're working on a project which requires smoothly-animated (as in field-rendered) MAPPING!! I was hoping that setting "FIELD-NO-DOUBLE" in the 3DS.SET file to ON/YES/TRUE would allow this. It apparently does not. It does cause each frame in the Keyframer to represent one rendered FIELD instead of one rendered FRAME, but the counting in .IFL files apparently follows the number of rendered FRAMES instead of FIELDS, regardless of that setting or the "Nth Frame Serial Numbering" option in the Render/Setup/Options dialog box. For instance, if I have a material mapped with an .IFL in the Self-Illumination Map as follows: allblack.gif 10 allwhite.gif 100 so that the faces so mapped will "light up" at frame 11 and remain lit for another 100 frames, it does this for FRAMES regardless of the FIELD-NO-DOUBLE setting! So that if I render frames 10 – 11 with the setting OFF, I get two frames: frame 10 with the faces not glowing, and frame 11 with the faces glowing. This is how it should be. But with the setting ON, I should get ONE frame, frame 5, with the first field having the faces not glowing and the second field having the faces glowing! This isn't what happens. Both fields have the faces not glowing. In fact the faces won't glow at all until the keyframer gets to rendering frame 22 by its reconing (frame 11 as per the output filenames)! Then the object is glowing in both fields from there through the next TWO hundred KF frames! It's even worse when the effect I want is a glowing (or transparency or other effect) WIPE over SEVERAL frames. Say, I want to cause a curved (lofted with mapping coordinates) neon tube to light up but not all at once: I want it to light at one end and have the light progress slowly to the other end until the entire tube is lit. I use Animator Pro's JOIN feature to build a simple left/right wipe over, say, 60 frames (I want this to last a full second, and since I'm planning on rendering to fields such that one KF frame = one rendered FIELD instead of FRAME, we're talking 60 Animator Pro frames per second, not 30 here). I then use Animator Studio to strip this down into numbered .GIFs so I can make an .IFL that will let me start the wipe when I want it (by putting ALLBLACK.GIF for the number of frames the tube is to be off, followed by the numbered wipe .GIFs, followed by ALLWHITE.GIF for the remainder of the animation or for the number of frames the tube is to be ON). In this case, with FIELD-NO-DOUBLE ON, it SHOULD render as I planned: the wipe happening over ONE second (30 frames, 60 fields/KF frames), but it does not. Not only does it render the wipe over TWO seconds, but it also happens twice as far into the animation since the ALLBLACK.GIF is ALSO doubled! If I cut the durations in half and use only every other frame of the wipe, I've lost the whole advantage of having FIELD-NO-DOUBLE in the FIRST-place: while the actual moving objects may be animated with field-rendered smoothness, the neon-wipe effect is strobing/jerky like anything else rendered to FRAMES would be!! HELP!!! We NEED this to work for a project due NOW!!!!