#MAPPING FLC FILES
7 messages in this thread
All right, I'm stumped! I'm working on an animation that uses self-illuminated
materials. I've created a .FLC 38 frames long to use as the self-illumination
map, intending to create a flashing light effect. It has 1 frame of white, with
37 frames of black. The period of the light is one flash for each 38 frames =
about 48 flashes /min. When I apply the self-illuminated material to my sphere,
and render it, the flash stays on for 9 frames. I've triple checked the FLC
file used for the self-illumination map, and it definitely flashes for 1 frame
out of the total 38. The 1 white frame is the first frame in the FLC. The
rendered animation in 3ds is 38 frames long also, but frames 30 – 37 show the
illuminated material, with 0 – 29 being black. Why isn't the timing of the FLC
file exactly to the resultant 3DS Flic??AArgh!!!
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Craig fries
Hi Craig,
Are you rendering the flic in medium palette mode?
Jonas,
Actually I am rendering the Flic in custom mode, using a palette I designed by
doing the render every 10th frame trick thing they have in the reference
manual. Am I wrong, or aren't you supposed to be able to do this and everything
lines up as you would expect? I'm going to test it on a different machine this
weekend to see if might be the machine its on or a configuration file entry
that needs to be tweaked. Any ideas?
Thanks
Craig Fries
Hi,
there's another way to do animated textures, which guarantees you more precise
control over the timing,
and some nice creative tricks too: the IFL's. Type a ascii-txt file, like
fram0001.tga, fram0002.tga, flash.jpg, fram0003.tga, fram0004.tga, flash.jpg
…., in the material editor, choose .IFL as bitmap-type,
choose the file. 3ds then will step through the list. (rember to include all
related files (also the ifl)) in
the mapping paths.
Bye from -cold- stuttgart, germany
Jan / Imagelab
Thanks for the info Jan. Any idea what is happening here? According to all I
can get my hands on to read, the way I've been trying should work! After
testing to get to the underlying problem, it seems that 3ds automatically
renders the first 30 frames as black, and the rest, up to an additional 30 , as
white. A 90 frame Flic using the self illuminating material (which has a period
of 30 frames, the first being white, the remaining 29 frames being black)
renders as 30 frames of black, followed by 30 frames of white, followed by 30
frames of black!? Yikes, is my machine posessed?
Thanks
Craig Fries
Have you tried just letting 3DS pick the palette (Medium mode) to see what
happens? — Sounds to me like your custom palette might be a possible source of
problems. You got me curious; pls let me know what happens, or how you solve
it.
SCL
Hi Craig,
don't know exactly what the problem with the flic source is, maybe your
computer is bored with you working all the time and tries to play some card
tricks on you <G>…
BTW. You will find a program MAKEIFL in the 3ds-root, which allows you to
automate the process of generating ifl-scripts. You also get 1) speedup, cause
the flic has to be encoded 256-colors-alike, 2) Better quality (24bit,
undithered maps, okeydokey, for
a self-illum-map, a bit oversized, but so what), 3) ecxonomize disk-space (as
long your're rendereing jpegs).
I wouldn't investigate the flic issue to much, you have a solution now, and i
assure you,
the animated map-stuff offers much more interesting unknown lands to discover.
Bye from Stuttgart, Germany
Jan / Imagelab