Would it be possible to have more than one handle to a snapshot’s image?
Simplest example:
I have a snapshot generating animated trackside billboards.
But, I’d want to have the same billboard in multiple positions on-screen at once.
One assumes the easiest way to do it would be to have each clone simply be another pointer to the same snapshot (so in effect they are all the same object - delete the original and the clones remain, with the same hierarchy into the snapshot object re: children etc.
Another use / example for this is the famous page-turning transition effect that always seems to get people so excitied.
If you just use a single snapshot, the non-perspective distortion of the path is going to be *really* obvious, and it also means you can only turn the page as a single object, so it wouldn’t look very nice.
If you want to minimise the distortion (in effect, help the perspective to kick in with subdivision) and add in an actual curl to the page as it turns, you’d need to take the snapshot, and divide it up into various strips, and animate each strip individually.
Now you can do this by creating the page snapshot, then setting up X strip snapshots and updating them 1 at a time by adding the page snapshot, invalidating, waiting to finish, setting up the next snapshot strip, adding the page snapshot, invalidating etc. etc. but this naturally has a time penalty.
If you could clone the snapshot image (IE create multiple references to it) then you’d naturally just set up all your strip snapshots with the cloned images and update all in one go.
I think this feature makes sense - snapshots are controlled like groups, but are actually a means to creating an image - IE that is the end result and what snapshots are designed to do. It would be useful if the resulting image could be controlled like other images (in the sense that you can load a single source image multiple times and have them all on screen at once with seperate display parameters).
Barry