Transparent Animation Help

[_Lars_ webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

I'm trying to figure out a way to load several frames of animation from an external file and display it in Director. I need to use a knockout color (or something equivalent) as the animated image isn't square (i.e. I need to see behind the edges of animated image.) I need a fairly automatic way of doing this as I'll have 100's of these things that get loaded based on the user's choice.

My first instinct was to use an animated GIF for each of the animations, but from what I read in the documentation Director does not support "Background Transparent" in animated GIFs.

Any suggestions on alternative methods? How can I load a mulit-frame animation from an external file and display it in Director with transparency?

Thank you for the suggestions.
- Lars

[JB]

Director treats pure white parts of an image as transparent when using
trans ink setting, or only 'outer' white areas with matte ink, there can
be a 'halo' problem with graphics that have antialiased to white art.

Director can also import the alpha channel of photoshop files for clean
antialiased outlines on any background.

You can import images at runtime either by using importintomember
command, or by changing the file property of a linked external bitmap
initially set to a 'plaeholder' file.



If the outline shape is fixed, you could use a mask sprite to define the
visible area, masks may be 1 (, 4?) or 8 bit grayscale images.

[_Lars_ webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

So I worked about 12+ hours on this yesterday and came up with a good solution.

Basically I created an external tool program (in c#) where you point to each of the still frames you want to use for an animation along with other data (such as whether you want it to loop, freeze on the last frame, disappear etc). The tool then exports a XML file with an animation name and associated animation data.

On the Director end, I have an animation object that loads the XML file. When animation is used, the animation object loads the individual frames and plays them back with the parameters defined in the tool.

The nice thing is that I can create an animatation out of PNG files so I can get full transparency.