Dots Animation - What's your approach to developing dots?

[Konjurer]

How do you guys animate dots?  I'm not talking about the primitive elements such as text, rectangles, etc.  More along the lines of animating characters, creating little video sequences, etc.

I'm guessing that Stern is playing a sequence of animation frames.  Is there a way to do that in MPF?  Would I create a low-res video in some tool (like Blender) and play it back as an MP4 video on the DMD display.  I did notice that my LCD full screen animations did play on the DMD but going from a hi-res, full color video to the DMD didn't translate well.

Is there an animation tool that supports dots?

Thanks,

Tim

[jabdoa]

There are multiple approaches. Videos certainly work. Some people use aftereffects. Other approaches are animated png sequences (put them into a zip). That is super simply to do in a vectorprogramm such as inkscape (or the equivalent Adobe program). A third variant is to animate images in MPF. Even simpler but sometimes too simple.

Jan

[Cadrion]

I haven't looked into this all that far but here is a link that may help..

http://merabheja.com/top-10-best-animation-softwares-free-download-windows/

I think you may be looking for bitmap animation, which pencil2d sounds like it can do... Good luck!

[Konjurer]

awesome info!

Thanks

[Brian Cox]

Here's the process that I used on a couple of games where I wanted a DMD "dot" effect on my LCD display. The dot overlay is spec'd out in your config, and you design you video to be low-res that matches the DMD you want:

• DMD video creation (as in Tattoo Mystique):

• Designed in Adobe Flash,

• Exported as JPG at 1008 x 336

• Combined into AVI using the Windows XP program MakeAVI.

• The target frame rate is 24fps.

• Re-process as .m4p using VLC

• H.264 codec

• M4P/MOV format

• Re-size to 150x50

Hope this helps,

Brian Cox

On Tuesday, November 28, 2017 at 7:18:47 PM UTC-8, Konjurer wrote:

awesome info!

Thanks

[jabdoa]

I would love to have a page in the documentation about this. If anybody wants to write some short paragraphs we would be happy to include it somewhere here: http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/dev/displays/index.html.

Jan