Hey Everyone, I was wondering someone could help me with this problem. What we need to do is make 3D Max render its animations into a single image. The reason for this is we want to make an animation of an explosion using 8 bit color and we need all of the frames of the explosion to use the same 8 bit palette. So if it were output in separate files that use the same 8 bit palette this would be useful also. Is this possible? If so how do you do it?

I'm not sure that you could do that.. another solution would be to find one of those free programs that combine more frames into a single image..

You could render the output in separate frames, convert these images to .gif and use any one of the free animated gif editors to play the explosion.

there is software to do this - combine images,
might be worth just writing your own using a free image
lib

Generally it is not worth while to try and get the 3d program to do this. (at least so I have found)

I suggest just outputting frames of animation as normal then using ImageMagick to arrange them as you like.

See:
http://www.imagemagick.org/

http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~anthony/graphics/imagick6/montage/

http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~anthony/graphics/imagick6/mosaics/