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BlobJump.anim.README
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1990-12-10
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OCT 10 1990 VAPOR PAINT ANIM DEMO
I thought some folks might like to see a very, very little example
of a Vapor Paint animation (I'm not much on long uploads). So
here's a 48 frame anim (with the first two frames repeated so
ShowAnim -C can play it) of a froglike blob doing a jump.
Vapor Paint is conceptually related to several existing animation
and drawing programs, although quite different in many respects
from all of them. It is closest in its motions to Fantavision and
Aegis Animator in that everything is created by linearly
interpolating between key frames. But unlike these programs, my
rendering is done to offscreen bitmaps using a number of
renderers. The black and white rendering is done with 8 bits per
pixel and the color rendering is done with 24 bits per pixel. In
general, the limits on the numbers of all structures (vertices,
vectors, screen size, cell planes....) is limited by memory only -
all indices are 32 bits in length.
The driving structure for Vapor Paint is a rendering tree which
produces an instantiated image at a certain "frame-time" by
selecting Pens, Colors and driving them with vectors. Each vector
is built out of 6-dimensional vertices, for x,y,z, Radius, Mass
and TimeStamp, which means that every line has a variable width,
like a painting stroke, and can have different amounts of pressure
applied to change its transparency. These same vectors also can
delineate areas, blend and smear. The timestamp is used for
correlation purposes when moving vectors around (one rarely
manipulates vertices in Vapor Paint).
Every color is defined with 64-bit precision: 65536 levels of
R,G,B and transparency. Thus blend and paint differ only in
transparency values. Colors also participate in the interpolation
scheme. Of course, these colors are simplified by the renderer to
practical values, but should more interesting hardware appear, I
could take advantage of it.
What eventually appears on the screen is mapped out by a View
object, which can also be interpolated, which provides a means for
zooms, tilts etc. It has two eye points and a focal length for
eventual stereo picture generation.
Vapor Paint's output is in numbered ILBM frames so that they can
be easily turned into .anims,.rifs,.cfasts or whatever and be
brought into existing animation programs to have other effects and
clean-up, etc. There is no reason why I can't write to a frame
buffer and then command a single frame device to snap a picure,
except that I know of no A1000 24-bit buffers and have no video
equipment! There is no reason why I couldn't drive an
HP7550-style plotter (for later photography and hand drawn
animation) either. I just don't have the equipment. For that
matter, there's no reason why I couldn't render sound instead of
frames, like my program RGS with its restictions removed.
Vapor Paint has several facilities for making sketches to base
animations on. Any object in the tree can be hidden. The
workspace can be animated to show anomalies in the inbetweening
processes.
Vapor Paint has a powerful Arexx interface which can be used to
convert other file formats into its own, or for general graphic
purposes. Macros can be invoked from inside the program,
and I plan to allow access to the rendering tree itself via
Arexx and have pens, colors and rendering algorithms available
to ARexx and possibly faster interfaces.
Vapor Paint is completely written in assembler. It is about 120 K
in size and probably runs in 1 Meg (I have 2.5 M). It uses the
ffp single precision math library - but it would be fairly easy to
convert it to hard coded 68881/2 code for extra speed. It's
pretty fast now on the good ol' A1000. I started working on it in
August of 1989 , but thought and talked about it for much longer
(hence the name.) There are still a few major features which
are unimplemented! Also, there are certain things which I'm
not going to put in, since they are more appropriate for
other programs - such as any operation involving input of bitmaps.
You will be able to add these features via Arexx though!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Vapor Paint was written for my own use. As you can probably
guess, it's difficult to document - but I'm working on it. When
in a suitable shape I'll release it into the public domain as
freeware. Sorry folks - I have all the Beta testers I want.
About this particular animation: "Blob Jump"
It is 48 frames long.
Each frame has 4 "subframes" in it to create motion blur.
Each frame took about 24 seconds to render and write to disk.
There are 8 key frames in the animation.
It took about 15 minutes to create.
Send a postcard to get on the mailing list, should I decide
to send this out.
J Henry H Lowengard
43 W 16th st #2D
N Y C 10011
CIS 76625,2425