The Multi-Figure Fighter is ready and now uploaded (see page one of this thread).
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Several of you have indicated an interest in the aircraft used in the ParatoopDrop animation.
Well, after searching through Lab Monkey's excellent unit library, I decided that the nearest thing to what I was looking for was the Air Tranport by BlueO.
Unfotunately, there seems to be something wrong with this flc file, as every time I try to run it through FLICster I get a "Runtime error 9" message.
Also, it doesn't appear to be complete, as when I opened it with the PaintShop Pro Animation Wizard (in order to convert it to a gif file), only 4 directions were available.
So what I did was to take the south direction, paste it onto the paratrooper storyboard, copied and pasted the twin tailplane onto the front, pasted the engines onto the back of the wings, added some propellers, and last of all changed it to a brown colour (as there is not much green in the paratrooper palette).
So I'm afraid what you see is all there is.....just a single frame moving in the north direction.
(....and no, I have far, Far, FAR too much to do already!
)
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Originally posted by Smoking mirror
How did you solve the smoke problem? Frame by frame editing?
Not quite.....just a little bit of storyboard copying and overpasting.
(This procedure looks complicated: it's not. It's just that I'm not very good at explaining things.)
1) run the storyboard through Steph's wonderful SBB utility to make an MF unit
(Let's call this storyboard 'A')
2) keep a copy of the orginal 'single-figure' storyboard, but remove all the shadows using PaintShops 'colour replacer' tool on all the bright red bits
(We'll call this storyboard 'B')
3) now make a copy of storyboard 'A', and do the same to remove all the smoke
(Called....you guest it......storyboard 'C')
Now what I want to do is to turn the whole of storyboard 'B' light grey.
To do this, you have to be in 16 million colours 24 bit format.
Soooo.....
4) open a new 24 bit image, and paste storyboard 'B' onto it
(I like to use a black background, as it shows the colours better)
5) now using the 'retouch' tool, pick a nice grey from the original storyboard (NOT a shadow or smoke grey), and use the 'colour to target' option to convert storyboard 'B'
(I also used the 'lightness up' option in order to brighten the dull grey a bit)
Last bit.....
6) as you can see below, storyboard 'A' has those annoying 'smoke-bite' chunks missing.
So copy the grey storyboard 'B' and paste it directly over the offending tank
(Picture 'A+B')
7) this has of course left the grey tank overlapping the green tank.
So, copy storyboard 'C' over the whole lot!
(Picture 'A+B+C')
The result is to very quickly fill-in the missing 'bites' with a grey area, which looks like the washed-out view you get when peering through smoke!
