animated textures

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/animated textures

cash	(Posted 2004) [#1]

I am looking at incoerporating some animated sprites.
I assume the only way to do this is by using createsprite with animated textures ?

If this is the case can anyone point me in the right direction where I can get some software to create "animated strips" from my single images.

Ross C

(Posted 2004) [#2]

Personally i use paint :) Pretty basic, but it gets the job done for me.

cash	(Posted 2004) [#3]

Is there a particular size or format for each image which works best ?

Ross C

(Posted 2004) [#4]

Well, your textures (images) should be a power of two for height and width. I'm talking about one frame here mind.

So one frame of animation should be:

Height: 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512 etc etc
Width : 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512 etc etc

try and keep the ratio of height to width under 8:1 and vise-versa.

Png is usually very good for textures, as it has good compression and lossless compression, unlike jpg.

Bitmap file format is ok to use too, as in memory, the texture is converted to an uncompressed image, so the difference between png ,bmp and jpg is nothing.

So keep you textures to a square power (single frame, the whole texture strip can be what you want), and i think png is the best texture format to use. Some ppl use tiff, as it has an alpha channel :)

Rottbott

(Posted 2004) [#5]

try and keep the ratio of height to width under 8:1 and vise-versa.

That's interesting.. I didn't know that could matter. What's the reasoning behind this?

Ross C

(Posted 2004) [#6]

Mustang mentioned something about this distorting the texture, and since he works for FutureMark, i heeded the advice. I'm not quoting him on it tho, but i remember him saying something along those lines :)

Matty

(Posted 2004) [#7]

Here is a simple technique for creating an animstrip:

;TotalWidth=Individual Frame Width*Number of Frames in total
TotalWidth=NumberofFrames*SpriteWidth
MyImage=CreateImage(TotalWidth,Height)
Dim MyFrame(NumberOfFrames)
for i=1 to NumberOfFrames
MyFrame(i)=loadimage("FileName in some format that includes a numeric identifier")
;Such as MyBitmap1.bmp, MyBitmap2.bmp MyBitmap3.bmp
;which can be loaded as MyFrame(i)=loadimage("MyBitmap"+Str(i)+".bmp")
;
setbuffer imagebuffer(MyImage)
DrawImage MyFrame(i),(i-1)*ImageWidth(MyFrame(i)),0

next
saveimage (MyImage,"Filename.bmp")
end