
Special thanks to Eric Kachelhoffer [71005,2130] 
who let me use his original T Rex animation, DINOSAR.ZIP.  

The following notes explain the steps in making this animation.  
It may give some nice ideas to Tempra Turbo users and for people
who do not use Tempra Turbo, it may give ideas on the powerful tools 
Turbo has as an FLC editor.

1. The first problem was wanting to combine a background from an 8 bit 
image to every frame of an FLC, made in 3D-Studio, both having only 256 
colors.  Due to the way computers handle 8 bit, 256 color images, 
combining a Dinosaur clipping onto the Ugh background the colors of the 
background would change.  16 bit-depth card users do not have to worry 
about that because they can have 32k of colors on the screen and adding 
a clipping will not change the first image. You can color compress each 
frame and add new colors to each palette, but Tempra Turbo Animator has 
an easier way.  Use the 16 bit depth mode (Hicolor) to combine the two 
images into one Hicolor FLX animation (32k colors).

2.  First you need to make sure the FLC's background is pure black. You
can set the fill color to 0,0,0 pure black and use the Wand to fill up
to the edge of the object, in my case the dinosaur.  Update each frame 
and continue until you have an FLC with nothing but the Dinosaur.

3.  Go to Hicolor mode and load the 8 bit background picture of Ugh and 
make a pattern of the whole background screen.  Save the pattern and load 
the Dinosaur FLC.  Using the Wand feature (set to a sensitivity of 10), 
fill most of black area with the pattern.  If the sensitivity is too high 
the filling color will bleed over into the dinosaur.   The polygon tool 
and the pen are easy to use to clean up the rest. Then just clicking on 
the Target icon will fill the pattern up to the edge of the Dinosaur. 
It is like painting with wallpaper.  Update the frame and go to the next 
frame and repeat.  

4. Now you have a nice FLX (32k color) animation made out of two 8 bit 
images with different palettes.  By entering the program in 8 bit mode 
and loading a 16 bit animation Tempra Turbo converts the FLX to an FLC.  
This error diffusion makes a smooth FLC.  The "Ugh the Caveman" and 
"T Rex" did not have any colors in common and in hicolor the palette 
doesn't change. The Ugh was an 8 bit PCX and T Rex was a 256 FLC. This 
could have been done better of I had started with the 3D Studio 24 bit TGA's 
and the original 24 bit Ugh painting.  Better yet, would be an example of
a hicolor background capture of real panned scenery (like REXVID.EXE on 
CompuServe, GO TEMPRA library 2).  
    The FLC format compresses the file and only adds the differences 
between the frames.  The more pixels that change between frames the bigger 
the animation.  Since error diffusion was used to bring the two animations 
together, the randomness of the colors can make the FLC bigger than the FLX.  That was countered by masking one frame's background 
pattern over the other.  The moving dinosaur in Frame 25 used up the greatest 
percentage of the screen, so the Wand Geo tool was used to cut out an area 
of the background, making sure that  enough room was left so that it would 
not cut off a piece of the dinosaur in another frame. Making sure that the 
Color menu was on Color fill,  the Reverse mask button in the Wand was used 
to keep the background and fill the dinosaur area.  Then the Target button 
was used to replace the dinosaur with black. The Color Pattern was picked 
in the Ink menu and with a Rectangle Geo tool the box was started at the 
top left of the screen and dragged to the lower right. Turbo's Auto Apply 
automatically copies the pattern of the background over every frame.
   This is very useful in live video, because Camera noise makes every 
captured frame a little different.  I left a bad area under the dinosaurs 
tail to show the differences in frames and how adding a pattern with Auto 
Apply can cut down the size by keeping non-moving areas constant. This cut 
the file size in half.
                        
The PC Speaker Music is an Ascii text file and is played with Tempra Show's 
Music Event.

                           Gary Dunn
                           75300,1760

             GO TEMPRA    GO COMART   and   GO MEDIAA
                1-800-852-MATH or 1-813-682-1128

                         press any key to quit
