Needle/Digits Animation

[Fall_guy 1]

Hi Everyone, Can someone please explain what I need to do in order to create a Needle animation and also a Digit display (Heading). A while ago I seem to remember Matthew mentioning FLASH. Could someone please confirm this or point me to a tutorial.Many Thanks for any infoJohn

[Guest Chris Wallace]

There is a reference guide to all standard gauge types (including various needle gauges and digital readout gauges) available at FlyDevelopers.com. Just follow-up here with whatever questions you have after browsing the relevant parts.Chris WallaceOttawa, Canada

[Fall_guy 1]

Hi Chris,Thanks for the info. I've had a look on Fly Developers website but can't seem to find anything on needles or gauges. Any ideas??Regards John

[Guest CaptainJ]

John,I always create needles with 3d Studio it's very handy one's you have animated in 360 degrees just let it render in 360 bitmap's. Very easy ;)about the didgets you can make your own if you like! the minimum of alowable height is 5 pixesl and use a length of 3 pixels otherwise you can't read out the numbers!Take care,

[Fall_guy 1]

Hi Jarno, Thanks for that, being a Mac guy I don't run 3D Studio, however I think Flash can do the same animation for the Needles, but I'm unsure of what format I have to save them in to place them in Fly??Regards John

[Guest Chris Wallace]

All of the needle animations are in PBG format, a proprietary image format for Fly! It's generally simplest if you create a 360-frame animation, one image for each degree of needle rotation. While animation applications like 3DStudio make it easier, you can use any graphics program you like to create a "stacked" bitmap image, where all of the animation frames are stacked up vertically into one big (tall) image, then saved as 256-colour BMP. The tools BMP2RAW and RAW2PBM will convert this to PBG format which can be specified as the image in a object as described in the Gauge Reference.Chris WallaceOttawa, Canada

[Guest Bart]

wrote some of these a few years backhttp://home.fuse.net/bartsflyplace/needle_tut_4.htmc ya :-waveBart flyhelp@zoomtown.comhttp://bartsflyplace.tripod.com/bart_logo3.jpg