ronburk

Hmmm, I wonder if one could make a material that supplies a vertical stack of gradient colors, apply it to the model with appropriate scaling, and let it automagically get all the altitude/color assignments perfectly correct?

If the "send email" link weren't broke on that page, I would've sent email to say "thanks for making that page" :-).

Font wizard is there, as the previous post locates. Alternatively, if you don't need the text to be highly 3-D and animatable on a per-character basis, you can use your favorite graphics editor to create a bitmap containing your text, and then decal that on to whatever. E.g., you can draw "Star Wars" on a bitmap using non-white colors on a white background, load the bitmap into A:M, set its "key color" to white, apply it to a 4x4 grid (courtesy of the grid model), and then animate that. If I don't need 3D-ness or per-character movement in the text, I'm prone to make a decal instead.

It would be really nice if you could boil it down to a small, reproducible case. That way, it could get reported and there would be one less "gremlin" for other folks to waste time on in the future.

What kind of decal (transparent, color, displacement, etc.)? Any chance you can boil it down to a small enough example that you could upload a .zip of the project?

Are you sure it was moving off frame 0 that did it? Or were you looking at a final render on frame 0 and then a preview on frame 1? IIRC, decals tend to not do much for me in previews. If that ain't it and nobody else has the solution, then: O/S? A:M version? Type of decal?

I'm using 12.0g++ on Windows 2000. I downloaded your bitmap and created a simple 10x10 grid to apply it to. Things I noticed of possible interest included: partially covered patches Patches partially covered by the decal produced 100% transparency for the not-covered portions of those partially-covered patches (no matter what the decal transparency % was set to). The advice to make sure you hide any patches that your decal is not going to completely cover when applying the decal holds here. 0-100% transparency This range of transparency appeared to affect the pure white portions of the transparency map. In other words, setting the decal "Percent" to 50% caused the white-covered portions of the model to be 50% transparent. At the point of "100%", white values finally offered complete opacity. Presumably, when you simply want the transparency map to convey a range of opacity where white equals opaque and black equals 100% transparent, you would set "Percent" to precisely "100%". transparency > 100% Increasing this parameter above 100% finally began to affect the actual transparency of bitmap pixels that were less than pure white. For example, at 200%, some of the gray fringe around your black circle appeared to have become nearly opaque. Although the documentation I read seemed to cite "5000%" as a magic number, that appeared to me to be insufficient to make black pixels produce 100% opacity. A value of 10000% appeared to me to produce 100% opacity, though I don't know if whether that is the exact value required. Nor do I know the formula for calculating how much opacity a black pixel conveys, given a particular value of "Percent" greater than 100. These seem like things that would be nice to know. funny bidness It seemed like there were some times where I had to save the project, exit AM, and restart to have a decal change correctly noticed. If I can repro this behavior when my 13.x arrives in the mail, I will report it. You might want to try a similar strategy if you make a decal change that seems to produce no difference. In summary, I was able to animate the transparency effect I believe you were trying to achieve, using your original bitmap, no need to mess with alpha channels, TGA, or anything else. I started with a "Percent" of 100 for the transparency decal, and had it increase to 10000. (I guess you want that to go the other way for the case of creating a hole.)

Nice tutorial -- thanks! If you expand this, you might want to cover a couple of additional points: a) How light interacts with the bitmap layers -- and the option of simply doing away with all lights if your animation consists only of bitmap layers. That perhaps results in fewer surprises for people who just want to animate bitmaps in a South Park style, and simply want the color of each pixel to be exactly as originally drawn, not affected by lighting. How to switch to an orthogonal camera, which can be desirable if you really want to do essentially 2d animation with just bitmap layers (don't forget switching the camera to orthogonal mode will leave the camera's Transform.Rotate.X at 5.71 degrees, which most people will probably want to immediately set to 0). Also worth pointing out that zooms are still possible by adjusting the orthogonal camera focal length. In terms of drawing more people in to read the tutorial, I suspect it would be a bigger draw if it were recast in the theme of "How to do South Park style animation with simple bitmaps and Animation Master". You supply the bitmaps and vulgarity, and A:M does the rest! :-)