cleaning up imported AVIs

**andy** · 26th October 2009, 05:25 AM

I am working on a game. I have just finished making the player's character and all of the other basic "groundwork".

Now I plan to use monsters that I will make with Spore Creature Creator. The problem is that once you make an avi movie of the monster with Spore Creature Creator, MMF2 can't import the resulting avi.

I solved that problem with MPEG convertor. That program is able to convert the avi made with Spore Creature Creature into a format the MMF2 can use.

However, once I do this and import into MMF2, the monster is surrounded by a layer of black. Is there any way I can remove this? Is there any good video and/or graphics program that can cleanly remove the black around what I import?

**willow** · 29th October 2009, 09:22 PM

yes had this problem myself after import select colour pick tool and select the checkered square once you have done that select fill and fill area.

**Paul_Boland** · 30th October 2009, 03:58 AM

That layer of black around the monsters is usually varying shades of black and just doing a fill won't eliminate it. The best thing to do is to export the animation as frames. Not sure what program will do this, MMF might let you do it from inside the Picture Editor. Anyway, once you have your animation out as a sequence of frames, load them all into a pro-graphics package (Adobe Photoshop Elements for example).

Select the Magic Wand tool and set the tolarence level to around 30 or higher. Now click on the black and this will select all the black. If it doesn't deselect and set your tollarence higher. If it selected some of the creature, deselect and set the tollarence lower. Once you have all the black selected, hit he Delete key on your keyboard. This will delete the black and replace it was a solid background colour (check the colour selections). Do this for all the frames.

Go back into MMF and create an Active Object. Import the first frame of your animation and provided they are numbered in sequence, MMF will import them all. Set the background colour to the colour now surrounding your creture and it will import proper with the background removed.