Attached Link: http://www.thebest3d.com/nsided

just in case you want to post-mortemly (post-work'ly?) add a halo around that perfectly round Sun, with animated streams and a halo, even tracking the motion of the sun through a few keyframes as the camera moves, here's something I did: www.thebest3d.com/carrara/spaceship > look towards the bottom, where the Sunwent from similar to yours to glary and animated streaks. Sometimes one forgets about the visual fx you wanted and a few hours or days of rendering later you wonder how you could make it more what you had in mind.

I'm not an expert at this but I think a screensaver file ends in .scr, and is an executable of some sorts, although it may have the ability of running animated gifs or avi and others. With irfanview, you can certainly package a bunch of images, animated Gifs and mp3 sound files into a screen saver. It's one thing to produce the media bits, it's another to present it as a screensaver application. I would not recommend animated Gif unless you don't care about the lack of colors. A frame in a Gif or Animated gif is 8-bit deep and this only 256 colors deep. In some cases that's alright. Hey, it's only a screensaver :-) but for some it's important to see the thousands or millions of colors of the images in the show.

Attached Link: http://www.irfanview.com

Attached Link: http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle

ooops, rats, I just realized this place is for products through Renderosity only. Sorry Clint. Take me off if you must. Or spread the word if you liked the idea.

By-the-way, what format is your existing Flash animation? I mean, is it vector content or Flash-MX style raster animation frames? (image sequence, AVI...) Have you tried Carrara? If you post or send me both samples (the AVI and the Flash) I'll see if I can combine those in Carrara.

There, found it. It's from Lost Marble: http://www.lostmarble.com/ It saves back to Flash and rendered AVI or other formats.

Moho is an animation studio for vector based 2D graphics, with bones/IK and the whole shablam. Costs $99 and they are from somewhere down under. Great product. I forgot the website but I have a link exchange with them at www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/links

good question. Yes and no, or rather no and yes... Dogwaffle currently only has one alpha channel overall, not one per frame, so it doesn't get the alpha from the animation in your file quite yet, that is however planned for v4 perhaps as an option at a premium or simply in v4 TBD However, there is a way to composite two video streams. There are options in the Timeline editor to composite with bluescreen or greenscreen or similar. I haven't used them but essentially I know they're there to achieve some of the compositing tasks people do. Also, you can load a movie into the brush. That one can actually have alpha per frame. And animated brush can be loaded from an image sequence, so if you can save your AVI into a Targa image sequence you're in the config best liked by Dogwaffle. There are tools to further process animated brushes by applying filters to them similarly to the Timeline editor. It's called the brush timeline in the Brush>animated submenu Try it in the 3.1 demo or feel free to send me a short clip of a second or more with your alpha, I'll extract it into alpha-present targa files, or you can send me a sequence of images in BMP, Tiff or Targa. I think either of these I should be able to test with

there are several ways... you could use Moho to play combinations of vector 2D animations (instead of Flash) and raster stills or possibly film clips (check this, I don't know Moho well enough, but I'd suspect it's possible, it's that good). If you render your vector animation to image sequence or AVI files you can load that into Project Dogwaffle as an animated brush and paint it over other animations such as rendered from 3D. There is also the Viewpoint player - a hybrid engine capable of playing vector based Flash content along with 3D. If you use Carrara you can use the Viewpoint export and have it play the 3D and Flash in realtime, i.e. not as a rendered raster. That can even include raster film texture mapped on 3D in viewpoint format. There are probably other tools or web3D formats capable of this. I just know that Carrara and Viewpoint have that. In Carrara you can load a Flash clip (vector) into a shader., then render your 3D with it. At least as a save to viewpoint, perhaps now also as a plain render? worth checking out.... Otherwise, render the flash to raster film, and texture map that into your 3D scene for re-render. And yes as mentioned earlier, you can also compose it in video editing tools . My favorite is Wax from debugmode. Great freeware.

I was attracted by the subject line... I had my own small personal triumph the other day, in Atlanta at DragonCon. I managed to show a fellow artist who had been struggling with modeling in AnimationMaster how easy it was to make simple and complex shapes in Carrara's various modelers. He might just go for the CS3 boxes still available at low cost. Then I attended and participated in the Iron Artist, and won! Hooray for Dogwaffle. I had a small advantage perhaps - the topic given by the Photoshop rep was something luckily I had lots of experience in, space art that is. We had to use an image of a rocket and could use other images. I proceeded to make a planet, added an armada of spaceships, lots of special fx and animated the whole thing. Yep, that made the wow effect. so there ;-)

if you mean texture images I would not assign them specifically to the shaders or something else. You never know in advance if you'll need them as backdrops, backgrounds or gels on a spot light some day. I recommend just copying the whole set from CD to "My DocumentsMy Stuff" or whatever. If you meant pre-fab shaders they can be added to the browser. See the docs. The same goes for model collections.

Interesting. For the videos at the bottom: is there > a way to make the glowing parts deform some other way > than applying that ripple kind of thing on top? That > would give it a more flowing look. I know what you mean (I think). The solid cool (dark) parts should not undergo the warping/wiggling transforms ideally, unless we want to make it look as still somewhat fluid. Would be more appropriate to have it hot red too if it's still soft and thus deformable. I started these textures with the Snowfall filter in the Timeline. I made fairly large snowfalls going straight down with no turbulence. I then added Ghosting to wash it out between frames. Then added Vertical motion blur. more Snowfall, more ghosting etc... Eventually it was a nice grey wall of blobs. Then I jumped to the swap buffer ('j') and loaded a noise pattern, switched back to main buffer and applioed the Displacement filter which uses the image of the fractal nopise from the swap buffer to displace the images in the animation's main buffers. Oh, and of course somewhere along the line I also mapped the whole thing against one of the red hot color gradient presets, can easily be finetuned though by editing the gradient to your liking. I also found that the dark parts in texture #1 were still too light so I passed the whole through the Value filters to darken it. There's obviously a glow filter applied in 3D rendering. You could have that done in Dogwaffle too of course but it would stick flat to the texture instead of glowing in 3D above the lava. I'll work on a how-to tutorial shortly