A beta release of this powerful new plugin
for LightWave 3D is now available. Useful for 2D and 3D game designers
as well as web designers, this plugin integrates an easy-to-use interface
with powerful color reduction, palette selection and dithering algorithms.
Besides creating great looking images in 256 or fewer colors, this plugin
lets the user select which colors will be used in an image, and whether
their values will be changed by the renderer. This plugin supports FLIC
animations and both BMP and GIF images(compliments of the GD
Library by Thomas Boutell and the Quest Center at Cold Spring Harbor
Labs).
- Top 10 Features
- Powerful dithering routines make images look great with
fewer colors!
- Lock colors to force the render into a given palette.
- Reserve colors to keep them out of images.
- Preset 216 'Magic' Netscape colors into palette for exact
results on all platforms.
- Preset 20 Windows colors into palette for PC friendly
graphics.
- Interlaced GIF (GIF87) and transparent-background GIF
(GIF89a) images are great for web pages.
- Exact control of GIF transparency color number and value.
- Dithered transparency option for GIF images captures
transparency, atmospheric and lighting effects.
- Fixed palette option for animations.
- Its free!!
Intel Plugin
Using paltool.p
This plugin adds 3 image savers, an animation saver, and
a generic control panel to LightWave 3D's plugin entries when you add it.
It works by maintaing a shared palette, which the image
savers use when rendering. When you first open the controls, the palette
will be random. After rendering (and saving!) a frame with one of the LW_Palette
savers, the palette will be filled with the palette used for that frame.
You can edit, save or lock that palette, and your changes will be used
for subsequent renders. Colors can be locked, meaning they will not be
changed when rendering, and will be used as-is wherever possible in the
final image. This is signified by a black box in the center of the color.
Colors can also be 'avoided' which means that they will not appear in the
final image, and their values will not be changed whether they are locked
or not.
When using GIF images with transparent backgrounds and
the Dithered Transparency option, it might be necessary turn on LightWave
3D's "Fader Alpha" rendering mode, since otherwise the colors
dithered into the GIF will already be blended into the background color
by LightWave 3D.
Color
Reduction / Palette Control Plugin