Hello All,
My name is Mike and this is my first post on this forum. Some of you may know me from photonlexicon- same mikkojay. I recently upgraded my Pangolin hardware and have been having a blast playing with the new functionality!
This is a short tutorial that explains a technique I have been using over the last week or so to build a small army of laser animations (such as those I uploaded for Valentine's Day on PL) using Pangolin's LCFlash and Mozilla Firefox.
Even if you don't have LCFlash, check it out- I have only had it for a week and I absolutely love it! I actually cobbled together my own SWF to ILDA converter using C#, but after fighting the ever-changing SWF format and trying to deal with hidden lines, I was nearly driven mad.
The meat of this tutorial deals with a quick and easy way to find SWF files then download/save them.
1) For an easy source of many usable SWF files, I reccomend istockphoto.com
istockphoto
Perform your searches with the "flash" checkbox checked only to reduce hits to what we want.
2) Click on the desired thumbnail, to go to the "sample" page. If it looks like one you want, follow these menu clicks in Firefox:
a) Tools
b) Page Info
c) Click the "Media" tab
d) scroll down through the media files until you find one of type "Embed"
e) Click "Save As..." and save the SWF file to the desire location.
3) Open LCFlash, and open your new SWF file
a) Tweak as needed (I have found that most need no tweaking whatsoever)
b) Export to desired laser format
c) That's it!
I have downloaded dozens of files and rendered them using this method with quite a bit of success.
***Important note***
I am currently using an ultra-new version of LCFlash. The mod with this version allows certain SWF files to be rendered as frames where previous versions will only "interpret" a given SWF as a single frame.
The new version converts the SWF file's object list into a series of frames, if the format is of this type.
I actually ran into many files of this type, so I sent a few samples to Pangolin to check out. Within 48 hours they had emailed me a new version that handles this format no problem- how cool is that? The end result is that I can now get busy browsing, downloading, and converting a whole bank of cool little animations.
----------------------------------------------
^bottom line: Try it! You'll Like It!
-Mike
My name is Mike and this is my first post on this forum. Some of you may know me from photonlexicon- same mikkojay. I recently upgraded my Pangolin hardware and have been having a blast playing with the new functionality!
This is a short tutorial that explains a technique I have been using over the last week or so to build a small army of laser animations (such as those I uploaded for Valentine's Day on PL) using Pangolin's LCFlash and Mozilla Firefox.
Even if you don't have LCFlash, check it out- I have only had it for a week and I absolutely love it! I actually cobbled together my own SWF to ILDA converter using C#, but after fighting the ever-changing SWF format and trying to deal with hidden lines, I was nearly driven mad.
The meat of this tutorial deals with a quick and easy way to find SWF files then download/save them.
1) For an easy source of many usable SWF files, I reccomend istockphoto.com
istockphoto
Perform your searches with the "flash" checkbox checked only to reduce hits to what we want.
2) Click on the desired thumbnail, to go to the "sample" page. If it looks like one you want, follow these menu clicks in Firefox:
a) Tools
b) Page Info
c) Click the "Media" tab
d) scroll down through the media files until you find one of type "Embed"
e) Click "Save As..." and save the SWF file to the desire location.
3) Open LCFlash, and open your new SWF file
a) Tweak as needed (I have found that most need no tweaking whatsoever)
b) Export to desired laser format
c) That's it!
I have downloaded dozens of files and rendered them using this method with quite a bit of success.
***Important note***
I am currently using an ultra-new version of LCFlash. The mod with this version allows certain SWF files to be rendered as frames where previous versions will only "interpret" a given SWF as a single frame.
The new version converts the SWF file's object list into a series of frames, if the format is of this type.
I actually ran into many files of this type, so I sent a few samples to Pangolin to check out. Within 48 hours they had emailed me a new version that handles this format no problem- how cool is that? The end result is that I can now get busy browsing, downloading, and converting a whole bank of cool little animations.
----------------------------------------------
^bottom line: Try it! You'll Like It!
-Mike
