Animated Linking Panel in the Book Pop up! Works!

[Aloys]

The lack of fly bys and animated linking panels was always a low point of Uru to me. As you describe in Myst it was something very special, and although by today's technological standards it isn't that big of deal anymore it still *looks* great.. Not including those in Uru never made sense. It'd be great to add them back.

Now for Uru Ages....hrmmm.....maybe go in with Fly mode? I've always thought that looked kinda jerky though.

Definitely jerky. Just a couple days ago I was watching old videos made by the New Tree guys (those), and they have some totally smooth camera moves in there; not the kind of result you can have with regular Fly Mode. I've no idea how they did that..

[andylegate]

Soooooo.....

Anyone want to suggest how I embed a 400 x 160 bik video on a 512 x 256 transparent background? I'm all ears...

Heres a link to the little .bik I made, as you can see it's all ready stretched out like the linking panels. Jerky though as Aloys mentioned. I think for home grown Ages, the animated camera idea will work better:

oh yah.....and I need to purchase a real video capture.....I don't think a linking panel will good good with the www.fraps.org watermark at the top would look good.

tsogal2.bik

[Trylon]

I probably didn't pay enough attention, but why do you need to embed it onto a transparent background?

[andylegate]

Ah Grasshopper! That is a good question! Please to observe:



EDIT: Opps! I used a png so it was transparent.....here it's a jpg, so the alpha shows up black all around it.

The image of the Cathedral is 400 x 160. But it's on a 512 x 256 image. The boarder all around is transparent. This is needed to put linking panels in the GUIBook pop up.

If you look at the Myst V binks, all the movies that say: "WithAlpha" are in this same format, and is why it was presented on the book.

The movies without the alpha are for the books just laying on the stand! They didn't use animated textures. They actually used a .bik move (I think animated texture would be better and smaller file sizes).

I can squeeze the movie down to 400 x 160, but it needs to rest on a 512 x 256 transparent background. I could have sworn i had a util that would let me do that.....of course I'm drugged up on some pain killers right now due to a tooth ache........so I'm a bit woozy........

[Paradox]

hmm, we seem to be discussing this in two threads at the same time But anyways...

Using Bink, extract the bitmaps. Do some crazy batch image scripting (I suggest ImageMagick) to resize and add an alpha border around each frame.

Using Bink, recompress the frames into a .bik file.

[andylegate]

235 frames.......oh boy......where's my asprin?

[Paradox]

235 frames.......oh boy......where's my asprin?

Hence the key word "batch"

[Grogyan]

You don't actually need FRAPS at all, whats even better, with the IPO script I manipulated, you can create a movie within Blender as well as in Game as a true flyby camera

That last bit I have yet to try out

I thought the radtools thing was just a video compressor executable

[andylegate]

No, Rad Video Tools does a lot more than just compress video: You can convert from one format to another, change the size of the video, extract frames from the video, all sorts of neat stuff.

Yah, I had already thought about using Blender for Fan Ages, but what about Uru Ages? You can leave it alone I guess, but thats where you'd need a video capture.

[Tweek]

What about plonking yourself in the Age with fraps, do a 360 degree turn whilst screen capping then stitch together with a panorama maker then using that as a base for the video?