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aaThomas
09-25-2007, 08:42 AM
Hi,

I am trying to make avatars by using a 'blue screen' technique:
* Filming people in front of a plain (white) background.
* Making the white parts transparent.
* Exporting the movie as Quicktime with a transparency channel.
* The movies are 256x256 pixels and 512x512 pixels.
* In Vizard, I use the movie as a texture on a quad.

Well, using 'Quicktime Alternative', I have gotten the movies to play, but the transparency does not work out. Do you have any suggestions on how to solve this?

farshizzo
09-25-2007, 11:17 AM
The current version of Vizard does not support alpha videos. It will be supported in the next release though. If you want me to test out your video to make sure it will work in the next release, you can send email it to me at lashkari@worldviz.com

aaThomas
09-27-2007, 08:03 AM
Too bad, but thanks for the reply!

I'll send you a 64x64 movie for testing purposes. Meanwhile I'm looking for alternative solutions:
* When do you (roughly) think that a version of Vizard will be released that supports quicktime + transparency?
* Is there any development in the support of animated gifs? http://www.worldviz.com/forum/showthread.php?t=130&highlight=gifs

farshizzo
09-27-2007, 09:32 AM
We plan on having a new release of Vizard within a month. There are no plans to support animated gifs.

aaThomas
10-25-2007, 08:31 AM
Hi again. Now that the new release of Vizard is out, I've been enjoying the quicktime movies with transparency - it works like a charm!

Though it wasn't planned, the release notes mention that animated GIF's are supported as well. http://www.worldviz.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1243

So I've been trying to get an animated GIF (with transparency) to play, but that didn't really work out. The animated GIF shows only the first frame (it doesn't animate). The function play() does not work with a GIF texture.

Have you got any ideas on how to get my GIF to animate?

farshizzo
10-25-2007, 09:28 AM
You need to add the animated GIF as a video texture, not a normal texture. Example:gif = viz.addVideo('animated.gif')
gif.play()

aaThomas
11-12-2007, 06:46 AM
Hi again! Lately I've been enjoying both Quicktime and GIF. When using a looped GIF as a video texture, I've noticed the following: After the (looped) GIF returns to the first frame, the frame-counter is not reset. Thus, after the GIF has looped, the value returned by getFrame() is larger than the value returned by getFrameCount().

Could be a bug, could be a feature... :-)

farshizzo
11-12-2007, 09:54 AM
I noticed the same problem here. Even the frame time is never reset. I believe this is a bug in Microsofts DirectShow filter. As a workaround you can use the mod operator to get the actual frame number.frame = video.getFrame() % video.getFrameCount()