Position Trigger for Images

Hi Alex,

Here's an example that works. Perhaps you can use this as a starting point. It will fade in imagecontainer1 when you approach Mercury.

Commands:

imageContainer1.prop.Enabled true

mercury.positiontrigger radius 1200

mercury.positiontrigger innerbound 800

mercury.positiontrigger minvalue 0

mercury.positiontrigger maxvalue 1

mercury.positiontrigger event imageContainer1.prop.Alpha

Note that radius and innerbound are expressed in the unit of the object's scene. In the case of Mercury (and most other planets I believe) that means a unit of 10 km. So the values 800 and 12000 will correspond to 8000 km and 12000 km respectively.

Also note that once you've set up a positiontrigger, the affected property (in this case imageContainer1 alpha) will be continously updated based on the camera position, so any attempts to manually set the property will be overwritten by the positiontrigger. 

Perhaps this is why you couldn't get the fade command to work?  Try the fade command on another imagecontainer and remember to also set the Enabled property of that container to "true" since only modifying alpha won't automatically enable the object if it is currently disabled.

Hi there,

Been playing with your position trigger code (which works perfectly) but was wondering if there was a way using them to have an image fade in and then out with relation to position.

So say if you were flying towards a planet then at 20,000km and image fades in and then when you get within 15,000km the image has faded out again. 

(i have grand plans for a pioneer 10 show where we follow the craft in on it's approach to jupiter and the images come in and fade out where they were taken)

Been having a play and I just can't seem to get it to work (but that could just be me being thick)

Many thanks

Alex

Hi Alex,

I'm afraid the positiontrigger does not allow the behavior you're describing. I first had an idea that you could use multiple positiontriggers to control fade ins and outs respectively.. but this will unfortunately not work, because the triggers will start conflicting with each other - one saying that the objects should be faded out, while another trigger simultaneously tries to fade it in.

We should definitely take a closer look at this feature and work to make it more flexible in future releases, but for now, there's not much that can be done.

Note: You could always use Producer to set things up just the way you want it with fading objects and everything else - assuming that you're ok with programming the camera path rather than flying interactively.

No worries,

Thanks for clarifying that though - at least i know it's not me just missing something obvious 

(I also tried the multiple triggers way and found the same problem)

It's always to way isn't it - the wish list for features never gets shorter: as as soon as you add something awesome like image containers and pos' triggers people like me go...'that's great and all, but what if it could also do this, this and this...'

I'll have to have a play with the Producer function (something i've been meaning to do for a while now), but since i'm doing this show next Saturday i think that will have to wait till january.

Thanks again for the speedy reply

Alex