imported_peterigz
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Hi, glad you like it 🙂
I had a very very quick go at some grass and a tree. It’s pretty basic and the particle shapes I used aren’t great, but it might give you a starting point, a lot depends on your art style. I think the main thing is, set the handle to the base of your plant and add some spin to make it sway.
I think I’m almost there with this. I think really there wasn’t much of a problem, although I am going to make a change that forces particles to be loaded as greyscale if they don’t speficy that they should. That effects file was created before I had implemented importing shapes as greyscale, so it has greyscale images being imported as full colour, this has a subtle but noticeable effect on the export.
Having changed that the big black blob on the export has gone, however the black halo is still there – but – that is more or less correct. The smoke particle on that effect is pure black, and all exports are rendered on a black background, so it is rendered as black, despite the black background being removed. Even though it’s removed, the particle is still black so it doesn’t make much difference. To compare the exported animation against the editor on a white background will always look different because if the editor renders black on white with a bit of transparency then it will come out light grey. It has to render on black otherwise all additive particles will always come out white.
So where does that leave us? lol. Well I’ll make that update tomorrow that sets greyscale as default, although I want to test some more first in case it messes something up. But as for correcting the effect with the black, simply making the black smoke particle a lighter grey should do the trick i think.
[attachment=0:3n3d5lvf]explosion.png[/attachment:3n3d5lvf]
Sorry, I didn’t answer the other question. You can’t customise the number of rows/columns no. the main reason is, that it keeps the texture sizes in powers of 2 as is what’s required of most graphics cards.
As for the issues with black, additive blended particles, what a headache! Haven’t really got very very far with that yet, but will keep at it and let you know. But meanwhile like I said, you can just avoid the dark additive particles and it should be fine.
Right, I can see what’s happening. If you look at the Fire particle in that effect you’ll see that it goes from orange to black, but the alpha doesn’t fade out until right at the end of it’s life. So what’s happening is, although the renderer doesn’t render a black particle if it’s using additive blend, the export still sees those black pixels because the alpha isn’t zero. I’ll have to adjust the exporter to take that into account.
Meanwhile you should be able to fix it by setting the alpha to zero at the same time the particle becomes black, or it might work better if the particle stays orange and just fade the alpha earlier. Just when I think I’ve sorted the exporter something else crops up lol. Thanks for the report 🙂
I *may* be able to add direct x support I’m not sure. The editor is built using wxWidgets which is multiplatform and uses opengl as a result, so I’m sure sure if I can attach a directx canvas or not, I’ll have to look into it.
I’ve heard ATI can be a bit funny with opengl sometimes, I have win 7 64 here with nVidia gfx card. I have a got an ati card lying around though, I might plug it in and see what happens. You might find there’s something you can tweak in the opengl settings of the catalyst drivers to get it running properly. Perhaps it’s just a specific setting causing issues. I’ll report back as soon as I find anything 🙂
Hi,
Well your system is certainly up to it! Timelinefx uses opengl so I’m wondering is there’s something wrong with your opengl drivers. They should be installed when the graphics drivers are installed so I wonder if something happened to mess them up. Do you have other applications that use opengl to see if they are performing ok or not?
You could also try downloading vaders from this site, just a small mini game that uses opengl also. Link is here: http://www.rigzsoft.co.uk/files/Vaders.zip
Let me know if that runs ok or not.
Ok, another new test version here which should hopefully fix these issues 🙂 http://www.rigzsoft.co.uk/files/TimelineFXEditorSetupTest.exe
Let me know how you get on.
Interesting links thanks. I had an Amiga 1200 back in the day as well as ataria st 😎
I’ll keep looking at the possibility of video export and weigh up the effort/time ratios 🙂 How are you currently managing it? Are you exporting a sequence of images and then converting those to video using something another tool like mplayer?
I think I’ve fixed the dived by zero and the 25 frame problem, I can’t do a proper build though until I get home from work, will post it then! 🙂
Ok, I think I might know why the divide by zero is occurring, it’s left over from me experimenting with fixes for the animation dialogue problems.
I’ll take a look at the other issues, although the best way to copy effects into another file at the moment is to use the import library option and then you can just select which file you want from there, that will properly import the shapes too.
What were the exact width and height of the animation where it crashed with 25 frames?
Thanks for the link, it’s a shame it’s windows only though, ideally there’s something out there that’s multi-platform. TimelineFX is written in a language called Blitzmax, but it can link to c/c++ files so that’s not an issue.
A lot of it depends on how easy it would be to implement, a lot of which depends on how many open source codecs and what-not there are that I could use. I’ll keep an eye out anyway 🙂
Well, I was hoping that I’d fixed that issue by making the changes in this thread but I guess those intel cards have other ideas! 🙄
I think your card is similar to NeilsJL but I make one happy and then other has issues 🙂
Anyway, try this version and let me know what happens, I’m basically telling it to re-upload the textures to the card again when the dialogue opens, so let’s see what happens. Thanks for testing!
Same link as before: http://www.rigzsoft.co.uk/files/TimelineFXEditorSetupTest.exe
