My PNG assembly application

Ok.. I think I finally have this to where it works pretty well. The only catch is you have to use green (0,255,0) as your background. It's OK if the object is anti-aliased to the backdrop.

1) Go to http://sites.google.com/site/raptorbase/ and
pick up GarminPNGBldr.zip. Unzip this to a temp directory and run the setup.exe file

2) In your favorite 3D app, Create 36 400x400pix images of the car from above and behind from 0° to 350° in steps of 10°. Store them together in a folder and make sure they are numbered 0-350, or 0-35, or 0000-0035, or 1-36, etc... You'll see the choices when you run my app. The numbering has to be the last part of the filename though

Examples: Shelby0000.bmp, Flintstones36.bmp, etc....

3) Create 36 350x350pix images of the car from straight above looking down from 0° to 350° in steps of 10°. Put these images in a sub folder "Top" in the folder you just put the other images in. You don't have to do this, but my app looks for this and will automatically fill in some things if it sees this.

4) Run the GarminPNGBldr application.
5) Click the 'Change' button next to the 3D directory and find the directory with you views from above and behind. If you have set up your directories as above, the app should fill in the 2D directory, and the file prefixes.

Note: If you used a name like Z06 and then added the numbering to it, the auto-fill won't show the '06'. just make sure the prefixes are correct.

6) I usually set the tolerance slider to 20 at this point.

7) Make sure:
-Resize is checked
-If the images are not anti-aliased to the back,
check that box
-Select the correct numbering scheme in the list box

8) Click 'Build Image' and see that it puts your composite image together right.

If you checked the not anti-aliased box, you can shift-left-click on the image to pick the background color if it's not green. Note that that will be the ONLY color used for transparency, there is no tolerance.

9) Click 'Alpha and Resize' to see the image with the background removed and sized to 2880x150

10) If you see areas of green that were not made transparant, up the tolerance and do 8 and 9 again.

10) Click 'Save' to save the file to both a transparent bitmap (.BMP) and a Portable Network Graphics (.PNG) file.

11) take a look at the .PNG file in whatever image editor you have.

12) If it's ok, go to:
http://www.techmods.net/nuvi/

convert your .PNG using 'png2srf'
(Thanx so much to the creators of this page!)

13) With you Nuvi connected by USB to the computer, open Windows Explorer and click on the Nuvi. then find the vehicles folder and copy the new vehicle to that folder. I think this folder is in a folder called Garmin? Sorry. Don't have my GPS with me

This works pretty well and I used it for all the vehicles I posted in the forum. I only had an issue with one anti-aliased vehicle because of the green.

Let me know if you have any issues! I already know of a couple of crash-points if you do the wrong thing at the wrong time, I just don't have time to fix them..

Mike