[FT3] Rotating Overlay
I haven't really played with overlays yet but I was wondering if they could be rotated?
My idea is this. Once my world is finished, I want to add three cloud overlays (with transparency) and create a series of images of the planet rotating, with each of the three overlays rotating at different rates in order to give the effect of a dynamic moving weather system).
Is this possible? If not, any chance of adding it (manual and script)?
My idea is this. Once my world is finished, I want to add three cloud overlays (with transparency) and create a series of images of the planet rotating, with each of the three overlays rotating at different rates in order to give the effect of a dynamic moving weather system).
Is this possible? If not, any chance of adding it (manual and script)?
Comments
Your talking about a different image per frame - with layers offset at different rates. Your going to be doing a lot of cutting and pasting cloud layers to do intermediate transitions - and there really is no easy way to explain it, but you could use a "1-2-3" rule, in which you move one layer - for instance, one frame per second (not necessarily literally, but figuritively / fractionally), another layer you would animate at 2 frames per second, and the third you would move 3 frames per second.
Imagine it this way - do you remember ever seeing a flip book where a stick figure is drawn in such a way on the pages of a pocket notebook in which - when you leaf the pages / flip the pages rapidly - it gives the illusion of the stick figure moving? Note that it takes "n" number of notebook pages to make the stick figure move his leg forward, giving the illusion of walking? Well - you are going to have to cut and paste cloud layers so that they transition - and your going to have to have three sets of cloud layer images, each edited to give the illusion of cloud patterns moving across the world base image at a different frame (sic - image) rate.
I would begin by labelling three new folders to hold images to be delegated to the three different layer speeds - and then choose three different cloud layers - and alter each to create transitional layers all edited to move at a given "n" frame rate per second.
You probably could not create this effect in FT3 - HOWEVER - you CAN in a 3d modelling / application program. Just create a sphere model in a 3d animation app - slap on your textures outputted from FT3 in the timed sequence, and snap an image per frame. You can either output a completed animation sequence in an app like BRYCE, or slap it together frame by frame in Windows Movie Maker.
BRYCE 7 is cheap at around 40 bucks - and ANIM8OR is free. You can also do it in BLENDER. I can tell you right now that you had better set a spare month aside - because this is NOT a single afternoon's worth of work - and it WILL be quite tedious my friend. If it's done right though - it will be a mind blower to see it in action. Needless to say - your going to be dicing and slicing a lot of cloud maps to improvise the movements of the layers from west to east correctly within the context of each layers resolution / image size. I hope that you can follow my insane, incoherent ravings, lol.
I'm probably using the wrong terminology as well. When I say rotate, I mean shift the overlay so that instead of wrapping it around the globe from -180 degrees to +180 degrees, instead it will start/finish at some other longitude. I suspect that the +/- 180 degree boundary will be what causes problems and probably won't let me do this. Since it doesn't appear that an overlay can be placed in such a way to cross that boundary, I'm hoping one can be placed and then shifted across the boundary instead.
Alternately, I could simply edit the overlay in PhotoShop, cutting the desired amount from one side and pasting it on the other and then applying the modified overlay normally. Doing that once would be trivially, but doing it a number of times becomes tedious, so I was hoping there was a more direct way of just readjusting the placement of the overlay within FT instead.
Once I have a series of images, there are all sorts of programs that can animate them (even an animated gif would work if the images are small enough).