Right Answers/Director2
2 messages in this thread
I joined Compuserve yesterday to hopefully get an answer to a Director 2
question. I got the upgrades, but they don't help. Question:
What am I doing wrong with "convertanim"?
1. I save an anim with DPaintIII (say a 20 frame anim).
2. With Director2, I use convertanim on that file and save the
new one under a new name.
3. When I play it with "Pingpong", the anim runs forward
to
frame 20, then shows something like frames 18 and
19, Sorry, I don't know what I'm doing. Here's 3 again, disregard the
previous #3.
3. When I run the anim with "pingpong", the anim goes from
1 to 20, then shows something like frames 2 and 3,
then runs from 20 back to 1 and back to 20 again, etc.
This seems fairly consistant. Can anyone help? I need
pingpong!/exit
Ok, the problem you are having, is that DPaint will automatically create an
ANIM with a 2 frame overlap, unconditionally assuming that you want to loop
the ANIM. However, for a pingpong, you don't want to overlap, as you are
experiencing, that will cause it to play to the end and wrap around to
frame 2 before reversing to go back the other direction.
There are several ways to correct for this. One, you can name the ANIM
ending in .anim1. If you do this, The Director will assume that what you
have is a two frame overlapping ANIM that you want to treat as if it did
not have those overlapping frames. This is probably the simplest way,
though the ANIM file still contains the extra two frames which can be
costing you memory you'd rather be using for something else.
Another method, is if you have a 20 frame ANIM, in DPaint do a save but
specify saving frames 1-18. DPaint will actually save frames 1-18 and then
add 19 and 20 as the overlapping frames (though I can't guarantee that this
will still occur under DPaint IV, it may be an unintended feature). The
only problem with doing this, is that if you ever reload it with DPaint,
you will lose those last two frames as DPaint thinks they are the redundant
overlapping frames.
And the last method, is to name your DPaint ANIM ending in .anim1 BEFORE
you run it through convertanim. convertanim will treat it as if it had two
less frames, and save the anim the way you want. Make sure though, that
the new ANIM is NOT named ending in .anim1, or when you play it back The
Director will treat your 20 frame ANIM as an 18 frame ANIM.
The example file "cartoon.anim1" was created using the first method
described above, so the playback example for that file could easily be used
to play your anim.
Keith