Atari Mega Archive 1/Atari Mega Archive - Volume 1.iso/graphics/anist.arc/ANIST.DOC

Text File | 1989-08-21 | 20KB | 437 lines

                                   Ani ST
                                     by
                                  Jim Kent
                    Program Copyright Dancing Flame, 1987
                Documentation Copyright Antic Publishing 1989

This program and documentation may be freely distributed.

NOTE: You may be familiar with the program previously marketed by Aegis as
Aegis Animator (TM).  Jim Kent, who wrote the program, has received the rights
to it back from Aegis.  Citing an inability for people to find the program, he
has entered it in the shareware market under the new name Ani ST.  The
suggested contribution is a smile.  The only change made in the program is a
fix to a problem the program had running with GDOS.


Great animation is a collaborative effort.  In a typical cartoon, the chief
animator only draws the principle image.  Later, someone called a "tweener"
comes along and draws all the in-between movements.  In the film Who Framed
Roger Rabbit?, for instance, if a scene called for Roger's eyes to pop out of
their sockets, the cartoonist would draw the beginning of the action (the
eyes ready to pop) and the end of the action (the eyes fully out of the
sockets).  A tweener would then draw in everything that happens in between,
one frame for each movement.

As you can guess, there are few people with enough patience and skill to be
good tweeners.  Computers, on the other hand, have nothing if not endless
patience.  And with Ani ST you can turn your ST into a professional tweener
in no time at all.  A color monitor is required.

As a computer tweener, Ani ST excels in what is known as metamorphic polygon
animation (polymorphic for short).  In this type of animation you draw an
initial shape and move it into another shape.  The computer generates the
in-between shapes automatically.  You can do this over a painted (.NEO or
.PI1) background or you can cut out pieces of a picture (CEL's and MSK's) to
move along a path, color cycle the result, then fade to black as the polygons
shrink in the distance.

                               Running Ani ST

Run ANIST.PRG in low resolution by double-clicking on its icon.  A black
screen will appear with a small, icon-driven menu on the upper left-hand
corner.  This is the "fast" menu.  I'll get to a button-by-button description
of the program shortly, but first let's try an experiment.

Let's make a circle that turns into a star that turns into a bigger circle.
To do this, move the cursor to the top of the screen and right-click.  The
Ani ST drop-down menus appear.  Select Make Circle under the Make menu.
Left-click to set the center of the circle, then move the cursor away from
the center about two inches and click again.  Now move to the top of the
screen and right-click again.  From the Move menu select Loop.  Your cursor
will change to a loop and the bottom of the screen will prompt you to select
a polygon.  Click once over the circle.  Now drag every other point of the
polygon away from the center of the circle to create a star.  Right-click
when you're through.  Select Play All from the Time drop-down.
Congratulations!  You've just produced you're first metamorphic animation.

To complete the sequence, select Next Tween from the Time drop-down.  Click
on the star shape to select it, and use the loop to move the inner point of
the star away from the center until you have a circle larger than the
original.  Try another Play All.  If everything was done correctly, you
should see a small circle change into a star and then from a star into a
large circle.

                      Button by Button: The Drop-Downs

Most of the functions of Ani ST are available either from the Fast Menu or
the drop-down menus.  In order to access these menus, press the right mouse
button while your cursor is at the very top of the screen.  You can close the
Fast Menu by clicking on the box in the upper left-hand corner; to bring it
back, click on Fast Menu under the Menu menu bar.

                                    Menu

Most of the Menu drop-downs take you to other menus.  Here too you'll find
the all important Undo and Exit options.

About - Displays program version and copyright.

Undo - Forgets last action.

Help Bar - When selected the program puts prompts at the bottom of the screen
(this is the default).

Fast Menu - Brings up or takes down the iconic fast menu.

Storage -  Goes to a flat-panel menu to load, save or kill files.

Storyboard - Goes to an editing display where you can cut and splice
animations.

Color - Goes to the color-mixing menu.

Time - Goes to the menu for setting speed of individual tween intervals and
the animation as a whole.  Also lets you jump around to a specific tween
interval and play animation forward or backward.

New Script - Wipes current script (animation) from memory.

Status - Tells how much memory is left in your machine.

Exit - Takes you to the Desktop.

                                    Make

Most of the Make drop-down options create new shapes.

Polygon - Creates a polygon shape one dot at a time.

Circle - Creates a circle (actually a 16-point polygon).

Star - Creates a star with five points.

Block - Creates a horizontal or vertical rectangle.  (You can't move the
vertices of a block, it's like a CEL or MSK that way.)

Filled - Newly created shapes will be solid (this is the default).

Outline - Newly created shapes will be outlined and the last point
automatically connected to the first.

Line - Newly created shapes will be outlined and the last point and first
point will be separate.

Clone - Creates an exact duplicate of an object.

Destroy - Removes an object.

Insert - Newly created objects will be on top of older objects (this is the
default).

Exchange - Newly created objects will replace the nearest older object.

                                    Move

The Move drop-down options let you either move or transform existing
shapes.

Sideways - Moves objects to either side in the plane of the screen.

Into Screen - Moves objects into the screen.  How far they move corresponds
to how far you move the mouse while the left button is down.

Out of Screen - Moves objects out of screen.

Rotate - Rotates objects in the plane of the screen.

Xrotate - Rotates objects about a horizontal axis.

Yrotate - Rotates objects about a vertical axis.

Big/Small - Shrinks or expands an object.  First set center point, then click
over object to resize and hold button down.  Move toward the center to
shrink, away from the center to expand.  Release button when the object is
the right size.

Along Path - Moves objects in the plane of the screen along a path you define
one point at a time.

Change Color - Changes objects to your current color.

Make Filled - Transforms an outline or line object to a filled one.

Make Outline - Transforms an object to outlined form.

Make Line - Transforms an object to line form.

Loop - The "easy" metamorphic tool.  Click on polygon to transform.  Then
drag around the vertices to new positions.

Hook - The "hard" metamorphic tool.  Click in the center of an edge to create
a new vertex.  Click on a vertex to move it.  If you move a vertex too close
to a neighboring vertex it will merge with the neighbor.

                                    Pick

The Pick options let you control how shapes are selected for the Move
operations.

Point - Moves a single point at a time.

Points - Moves several points at a time.  When this is active you'll first
select the points and then go into the "move" part of the operation.  Select
a point by left-clicking on it.  Another left-click over the same point will
de-select it.  Right-click when you have all the points you've selected.

Segment - Move a segment, or series of connected points, in a polygon, star
or circle.  First click on the polygon containing the segment.  Then click on
the first point of the segment.  Click on the second point of the segment
and, finally, right-click and hold the button down over the