Making movies

[AdmiralToguroAni]

I need some help on this. I'm trying to make some of the movies, and it involves still pictures flying across the screen. The problem is that I dont know how to do it. Here is an example of what I want:

 

A K-wing flies across the screen, and once it reaches the middle, a proton torpedo appears from under it. It heads toward the target as the K-wing flies away. The torpedo hits the target and then an explosion effect replaces the target's image.

 

This can all be done simply by moving still pictures around, but I dont know of any program that can do them. Can anyone help me out? Thanks.

[Krytos]

I'd recomend either Macromedia Flash or, better suited to the job, Macromedia Director.

Both are able to do what you asked for as well as being pretty simple and easy to use. If memory serves me right Director can export to different movie formats.

[Mad78]

Adobe ImageReady is the one you want!

It would be fine for what you want to do. Though if you want to have something more realistic you will have to use a 3d prog.

[AdmiralToguroAni]

I would use a 3d prog, but I don't have the skills necessary. Given that this is a solo project for the most part, I have to do what I'm capable of.

[Mad78]

Go for ImageReady then. You can pick up the basics in less than a day and you can make some rather impressive stuff once you have really got the hang of it.

[Krytos]

Hmm, ImageReady isn't really suited for to creating movies - it's meant for doing web graphics and small gif style animations. It would be pain-stacking to have to animate that kind of thing through ImageReady

Director is meant for this exact style of animation - using bitmap style graphics in animations by moving them, scaling them and more. You can add an image to keyframe 1 move it to the next position on the timeline, keyframe it and then add a tween that will fill in the movement for you.

The timeline is divided into layers, so adding effects over or under images is easy. You can add sound to the animation etc. There are plenty of tutorials on the web for it as well, and it's a pretty simple program to get use to (probably not as easy as Image Ready).

It is better suited to the task. Given that you have the images ready, with masks, the animation should take around an hour roughly if you havn't much experience or you're finiky. I could "probably" do it in half in hour - though I dont remember that much of Director after using Flash.

[Mad78]

I would just like to say that Image Ready can be used for longish films. I used it for some sequences in the animation I am working on and i picked up how to use it in about an hour.

[Krytos]

I know that ImageReady can be used for the task, it's just the Director is far better for the job. Though, in the end all of this talk depends on one thing: What Toguro can get his hands on

[AdmiralToguroAni]

All right! I found a 3d program that I used for certain parts of the movies. Now, I only have 2 more to go before I can put this baby to rest and release it for all of you to play. The two movies I have to do, however, are the shuttle movies. I like them, but I really only want to use the part where the shuttle turns and goes into hyperspace. Is there a way to cut the rest of those movies out, and just use those first 10 seconds or so?

[mrpp]

Hiya

 

I've been using Smacker by RADtools to edit movies to suit. That is existing movies from previous Star Wars games and playing about trying to animate my own. Limited to stringing bitmaps together. Can be time consuming.

 

They edit reasonally well, but the problem comes when trying to get them into the game.

 

The Movie Patch works fine, but only on unedited movies from XvT : Balance Of Power, a game that is from a similar time period to Rebellion/ Supremacy.

 

I'm finding that the Smacker movies won't play in the game because i think the SMACKERW32.dll cannot cope with newer versions of SMACKER.

[the_mask]

Never tried, if newer versions of the smackerw32.dll can handle newer .smk or even .bik files.

 

However, you can download an older version of smacker 3.0 from my site.

That one works well and we're converting the movies for Reloaded with it, too

[mrpp]

I used your new link to Smacker3.0 and it works fine.

 

I guess you just can't use a later version of smacker.