Chase with a head and a tail?

[marmalade]

As per the title!  I would like a chase around the perimeter of my megastar consisting of a single white pixel, 3 red pixels and a single white pixel for the tail.

Have tried everything including single strand layers! Obviously need more practice, but can someone help?

thanks

[Gilrock]

Use the Marquee effect.  Select 5 colors and make them go:  white, red, red, red, white.  Then dial in whatever size gap you need.

[Gilrock]

Actually that would gap between colors so best thing might be select additional colors of black so you could get a 3 pixel gap using 3 blacks.

[marmalade]

Thanks Gil! Lateral thinking



What would be the best way to increase the distance between the groups? I guess make a new layer using the same effect (in black), offset it and mask?

Would be handy to increase the 6 colours palette for string effects like this )

[Gilrock]

The palette is already 8 colors.  We increased it from 6 to 8 and I don't think it will grow again.  Sometimes you just gotta come up with ideas that can actually be done with the software...sometimes I think people try to go out of their way to find something it can't do.

[marmalade]

Figured if xl can't generate the sequence required, just draw it in paint

Using a 1 pix high bmp and adding a picture effect (tile left or right), xl nicely outputs the colors in the exact order required and keeps them moving on the string of nodes as well. Awesome software.

Is there more overhead for xl to read from a pic compared to a internally generated sequence (or does it just buffer  internally and treat it as an array?)

[Gilrock]

It's only going to matter at render time.  Once you render the sequence it doesn't matter how the data got there its always the same speed.