MIPS HEAVY INDUSTRIES

A blog by djmips in General

Followers 3

entries
21
comments
83
views
24,362

Broken tools - Rendering from Maya

Entry posted by Guest December 5, 2005

400 views

Followers 0

Well, I rendered out another set of animations for Amiga Boing 2.0 last night and I still had problems with the conversion. The new anims look good in the viewer but I still haven't seen them running in the demo.The problem is that the PCX2GRP only takes 320x200 grayscale PCX files as input. Well, I found a fantastic tool (Image Magick) that does everything you'd want. It takes the 48x90 rendered bitmaps and can convert them to 8 bit grayscale PCX files at 320X200 ALL IN ONE STEP! alas... it has a bug, when writing out PCX files it always converts to a PCX with a palette. Sigh... and I can't find any other tool that automatically generates the appropriate format. What I will have to do this evening is to adpapt PCX2GRP to accept a PCX with a palette. Good thing it has source.Once this final step is complete, I won't have to do anymore work by hand. I can tweak my animations in Maya, select batch render, then run a script and they will all be in DASM source in one fell swoop.I think I may be the only person on the planet who is pre-rendering animations in Maya for the Atari 2600.

Followers 0

1 Comment

Recommended Comments

djmips 64

Posted December 5, 2005

Here's my first comment. By me!

I found a workaround with the Image Magick art pipeline. I first convert the rendered tga files to 8bit grayscale PNG files. I then convert those files to 8bit grayscale PCX files. Now, I tried this at one point early on but gave up because I was using Photoshop to determine if it had worked (and not the PCX2GRP) tool. Well, it turns out it does work, but Photoshop still shows that the PCX is using indexed color and not grayscale. Photoshop is correct, however, it is using the special 48 byte palette that fits in the PCX header and in fact, the rest of the file is compatible with a grayscale PCX and works fine with PCX2GRP...