Flash Light Effect

From:   Simon Windmill[SMTP:simon@wfmm.com]
Sent:   Monday, January 06, 1997 9:28 AM
To:     Multiple recipients of list DIRECT-L
Subject:Re: Flash Light Effect

> I saw a demo by Spinaker where the cursor was like a flashlight and as
> you moved around the screen things would be colored in where the flash
> light was -- otherwise it was dark.  I hope this makes sense.  How do
> you do that?!?

Quick and dirty:

Make a quickdraw member, a circle, put it in chan 1, set the channel to not copy

Put your background in chan 2, make the chan transparent.

Voila.

Notes: This works best with the stagecolor black. Other colors cause you groovy effects, maybe useful, maybe not. And this was tested at 24bit depth. On Windows.

Hope this is what you wanted; it'll be the first thing I've posted that's actually (maybe) useful ;)

Si.
Simon Windmill, Multimedia Director
windmill fraser multimedia - http://www.wfmm.com/
Tech: simon@wfmm.com Business: amy@wfmm.com General: office@wfmm.com

Date:    Sat, 11 Jan 1997 21:50:14 GMT
From:    Fiona and Richard 
Subject: Re: Flash Light Effect
I was sure there must be a way to do this without shifting screen sized masks around - heres one and it works in 256 colours.

Put the light patch sprite behind the image that you're lighting and set it's ink to matte. Then set it's forground/backround sprite chips to white and black (ie the reverse of the default). Then set the stage colour to black and the ink of the image to darkest - moving the light patch sprite around (however you want to do it) will light up that patch of the image. It's well worth while playing with the colour of the light patch sprite as this tints the image in different ways and if you use a radial gradient on it, you can get the effect of the light being stronger in the centre - basically the darker the light patch sprite, the lighter the patch. I have found that a dark blue at the centre fading out to white gives the effect of a yellow flashlight that is yellowest in the middle. 

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 19:15:33 +0200
From: wax.imma@lollhs.lollerhverv.dk (R.M Walker-Nygaard)
Just a litle cool modification of the mentioned flashlighteffect. if you want to illuminate for text, try this:
  1. put your spot in channel 1 and apply background transparent ink....
  2. put you text in channel 2 and apply transparent ink....