Flic Pallets and VBX
4 messages in this thread
"There seems to be a color shift in the pallets when you play a .flc file using
the autodesk Visual Basic control or DLL calls in Windows"
If there's a bug in the way we handle BMP palettes, you might be able to
highlight it by converting the BMPs to 1 frame FLC files (or GIFs), then play
back and compare the results.
Are you doing anything that we can duplicate here? What are your steps, etc.
Very helpful if you can cause a problem to occur with files we can play with
here.
Nik
Nik,
Here are the steps I have been going through.
1) Rendered the animation on "high" in 3ds to create a good pallet for the 3DS
model.
2) Used the AAWIN program to "Convert the animation for windows playback"
3) Used Animator Pro to load this converted animation in and save out a single
GIF image and a .PAL file for use in re-rendering the 3DS model.
4) This .GIF image saved in the last step was loaded into BitEdit (The simple
paint program that came with Video for Windows.) and the pallet was extracted
and saved as a windows pallet to be used in all bitmaps used in the final
program.
5) The .GIF file was then saved as a windows .BMP file for use as the
background in the VB form.
When the program is played in a 256 color windows mode, there is a flash and
part of the .flc file can be seen with what appears to be red instead of the
black, then the .flc plays fine. But this flash is annoying.
I I convert the .FLC to a .AVI file using the same pallet. There isn't any
flash at the start of the .AVI. (But the AVI file skips frames and the
animation looks jerky.)
I am going to be playing around more with it today and I will try doing it with
just one frame to see if I can figure out what is going on. Thanks for your
assistance.
Andrew McClary
Thank you for your excellent documentation of the steps you have taken. When
using AAPro (I might put this step ahead of the AAWIN Convert step) try using
ONE PALETTE. Although I can't be sure that this would do any good, I'm
suggesting it because you may have created a flic with a palette which varies
throughout the frames. Select ONE PALETTE, then go through the AAWIN step of
Converting the Animation…
Let us know your results.
Thanks.
Nik,
I have used Animator Pro and assigned that converted pallet to EVERYTHING from
the background bitmaps to all of the flics. There isn't any color cycling. I
just need a stable 236 color pallet. With a litle experimentation, it seems
that when the .fli is loaded, it doesn't check to see if the first 10 and last
ten colors are the ones it needs, it just pushes them to the right and adds in
ten more spots to the pallet. You always get a flash when this occures. (There
are then a repeat of the windows colors and your pallet has been reduced by at
least 10 more.)
When you run the file through the convert program in AAWIN, does it change the
file structure other than putting in a new pallet? Is there any way the
AAPLAY.VBX could be re written so that it just overwrites the first and last
ten pallet positions instead of re-ordering them? I really want to find a
solution for this because I am not satisfied with the .AVI playback quality of
higher resolution animations. (I don't want frames dropped!)
Let me know if there is anyway we can work these problems out.
Andrew McClary
Graphic Alchemy Productions