Re: (Pathetic cry for FAQ help) Re: ZoomRaster movies

[Nelson Minar]

For animations of Swarm stuff, the format you probably want is FLI or
FLC (two names for the same thing). It can be played by xanim on Unix
and lots of stuff in Windows. Animated GIFs are much larger, and lossy
schemes like MPEG or Quicktime really aren't suitable for digital data
(it'll be very blurry).

Making FLI in Unix is a pain. The program you want is part of the FBM
package, "fuzzy bitmap" - fboctree and fbm2fli are the main things.
I'll include a script I wrote to take a bunch of PNG files and make an
FLI out of them using these tools; it shouldn't be too hard to adapt
this to a bunch of PPM or GIF files (I based it on the netpbm tools).

In Windows there are lots of FLI/FLC creation programs. I haven't used
any of them. The old DOS program people used was Dave's Targa
Animator. For all I know, that might still be a good tool.


Here's my png2fli script:


#!/bin/bash
# make a .fli file from the given list of .png files
# requires pngtopnm, pnmtorast, fboctree, fbm2fli
# usage: png2fli "fbm2fli arguments" 0.png 1.png ...

fbm2fliparams="$1"
shift
list="$@"
output=output.fli
octdata=/tmp/octree.$$
giflist=/tmp/fbm2fli.$$

if [ -e $output ]; then
  echo "$output already exists, you need to remove it."
  exit 1;
fi

echo -n 'Building the octree data.  '
for f in $list; do
        echo -n "${f%.png} "
        pngtopnm $f | pnmtorast | fboctree -a $octdata
done 2> /dev/null
echo

echo -n 'Converting PNG files to 8 bit GIFs.  '
for f in $list; do
        nf=/tmp/${f%.png}.$$.gif
        echo -n "${f%.png} "
        pngtopnm $f | pnmtorast | fboctree -G $octdata > $nf
        echo $nf >> $giflist
done 2> /dev/null
echo

echo "Creating $output from the GIFs"
fbm2fli $fbm2fliparams $giflist $output > /dev/null 2> /dev/null

echo "Cleaning up"
rm `cat $giflist`
rm $giflist $octdata

exit 0;

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