CompuServe Thread

Animator Pro is your answer. – Phil

Hi Andrew, What I would do is get your 240 colors that you will use and make the other 16 colors neon green (0,255,0) or some color you know will not be used in your flic. That way, when you render your anim to the pallete it will not use those 16 that you have 'masked out'. then dit in your 16 colors that you need for programming. Ani Pro can do this, but I think 'Pal Edit' (pallete editor that is included with Microsoft developers software) does a better job. and it has a feature that will automaticly put the standard windows colors into your pallete, in their correct positions too. 🙂 I need to do this all the time for my job. 🙁 -Kyle

Take a look at that FLIC-COLORS parameter in your 3ds.set file. It's described on page 57 of the Installation Guide. It'll let you reserve a set number of color registers. – Jack

Hi Andrew. The best way I have found to come up with an optimal palette is the following. Render your frames in any 24 bit format or at least jpg at 100% quality. In photoshop or other 24 bit program composite (paste in a single frame) a few different frames of your animation that have important colors that you want represented in your flic. If there is a small part of the rendering that needs special attention in terms of color (a big blue room with a small red object for example) then cut and paste the smaller object a few times. Save your frame as pal.tga or jpg or whatever. Then in DOS use a program such as Alchemy or Alch386 to make your reduced palette selection specifying how many colors you want from that saved 24bit file. This is now your optimized palette. Use Alchemy again to convert all your frames to that palette into a format such as pcx or gif and load all those frames into AniPro to finally convert them into a flic. I know it sounds convoluted but it produces flics with a much higher quality that rendering a flic directly from 3Ds. Until DeBabelizer comes to the PC, which is about to happen there is no program I know of that does better file conversion and palette selection than Alchemy does. Hope it helps and it is not too confusing Arturo