For some of the effects, you may want to set up a sprite animation. Sprite Animations work by having a sequences of frames that make up the animation clip. To have the animation blend in with the rest of the effect, you will need an alpha channel in your image files.
There are two ways to create and load an animated sprite. Once you have your collection of frames, you can either have all the frames in the same image file or have them as separate files in numerical order.
When you load an animated sprite, you need to choose if you are loading a single image or Sprite File Sequence.
Here is an example of animated sequence in the same image file.
You can view the original file in the Blood Cells folder inside the Graphics folder of your AdVis installation.
Each frame is evenly spaced apart and the overall width of the image file must be completely filled with frames. In this example, each frame is 256 x 256 pixels and the overall image size is 2048 x 2048 pixels so the frames fit all the way across the image without any extra pixels. It's only important that they fit the width of the image as AdVis reads the frames from left to right.
You will have to enter the size of each frame as well as the amount of frames after you have imported the image file.
Using products such as 3D Studio Max, you can export the frames of an animation into a numerical sequence of files. If you have all the frames contained within a folder, you can choose the 'Sprite File Sequence' option when browsing for your image. The first file in the sequence must end in a 000 and subsequent frames must be numbered in order. For example, you have four frames: image000.png (First Frame), image001.png, image002.png, image003.png. When you are browsing for your image, you just need to select the first frame (image000.png) and the rest of the frames will be automatically loaded. Settings such as Frame Width and Height and number of frames will also be automatically determined.
