Goal Key

Select color under cursor Fl

Save current cursor position F3
Move to last-saved cursor position F4
Toggle brush size B
Delete a file from the Files panel D
Load a file from the Files panel L
Exit from Files panel E
Save a file from the Files panel s
Move a eel M
Go to Optics panel 0
Go to Palette panel @
Quit Animator Q
Erase drawing screen x
Answer Ths to a prompt y
Answer No to a prompt N
Answer OK to a prompt Enter
Select numbered menu options 1-9
Exit from numbered menu 0
Play the five most recent frames 5
Play the current segment of frames Enter
Undo or redo the last operation Backspace
Get part of screen as a eel Esc
Erase all text in text buffer Esc
Change or can cel (same as right-dick) Spacebar
Clip the drawing screen as a eel Tab
Previous frame , - (left arrow)
Next frame - (right arrow)
First frame t (up arrow)
Last frame +(down arrow)
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Mastering
Animator
MASTERING
ANIMATOR

Mitch Gould

San Francisco Paris Diisseldorf Soest

Acquisitions Editor: Dianne King
Developmental Editor: Christian Crumlish
Editor: David Krassner
Technical Editor: Byron W. Putman
Word Processors: Scott Campbell, Ann Dunn, and Lisa Mitchell
Series Designer: Eleanor Ramos
Chapter Art and Layout: Lisa Jaffe
Screen Graphics: Delia Brown
T ypesetter: Stephanie Hollier
Proofreader: Dina F. Quan
Indexer: Julie Kawabata
Cover Designer: Ingalls + Associates
Cover Photographer: Mark Johann

SYBEX is a registered trademark of SYBEX, Inc .

T RADEMARKS: SYBEX has attempted throughout this book to distinguish

proprietary trademarks from descriptive terms by following the capitalization
style used by the manufacturer.

SYBEX is not affiliated with any manufacturer.

Every effort has been made to supply complete and accurate information.
However, SYBEX assumes no responsibility for its use, nor for any infringement of
the intellectual property rights of third parties which would result from such use .

Library of Congress Card Number: 90-72083

ISBN: 0-89588-688-X

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Rosalie Santine Gould
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the great things about authorship is the circle of people that it
introduces to you. At Sybex this includes Dianne King, who saw a diamond
of possibility in my original, somewhat muddled proposal, and Barbara
Gordon and Christian Crumlish, who oversaw the scheduling and coordina
tion of the development, editing, and production of this book. In the critical
early stage, freelance editor Mike Edwards provided care and insight in
bringing the Sybex formula for success to the book.
Delia Brown, Thomas Goudie, and Lisa Jaffe went well beyond the call
of duty in design and layout. Dina Quan, the proofreader, also deserves
thanks, as does Stephanie Hollier, the typesetter. But above all, the pilot who
steered this book safely into your hands was my skilled and perceptive edi
tor, David Krassner. Thanks also to my agent, Bill Gladstone at Waterside
Productions, for taking on an unknown quantity.
W hen I began this book, I was the technical documentation depart
ment fo r Brock Control Systems, where I am indebted to Richard Brock, a
visionary; Cary Bradley, an inspiration; and Bud Pass, a sage, for allowing
me to begin this book . These three very different men have in common a
concern fo r preserving the human side of business.
At the same time, I was also the one-man reporting and editing staff for
the newsletter at Atlanta's chapter of the International Television Associa
tion (ITVA), and served on the Atlanta ITVA Executive Committee. Between
my regular job, my volunteer work, and the book, I was occasionally able to
squeeze in such fourth- and fifth-priority tasks as eating and sleeping. ITVA
graciously ignored some of the slipped deadlines for the newsletter, and still
agreed to teach this greenhorn everything he could manage to learn about
video production on such short notice.
The people at Autodesk deserve a very special note of thanks, notably:
Joel Sher, Executive Director of Multimedia Sales and Vendor Relations;
Dennis Phinney, Sales Manager for Autodesk's Multimedia Division; Bob
Bennett, Product Manager fo r the development and promotion of Animator
and 3D Studio; and Gloria Bastidas, my primary contact at Autodesk. They
provided all the assistance I needed, despite their own harried agendas,
while I was still digesting the intricacies of Animator. Grant Blaha, senior
animator/troubleshooter, shared a great deal with me, including his exper
tise in reviewing a portion of this book. The opportunity to work with Auto
desk has been the key privilege and delight of this effort. And needless to
say, on behalf of professional communicators everywhere, I would like to
thank the Yost Group for creating Animator and 3D Studio, particularly Jim
Kent, Tom Hudson,and Gary Yost.
I would like to thank Howell Phelps and Jim Bums at Video Associates
Laboratories for the loan of the Microkey audio card. I am indebted to the inimi
table Emilio Aparicio of Evolution Technologies for many fascinating discus
sions; ditto to Richard Gross of Antex Electronics. Nick Ketter at Crosstown
Audio generously read my chapter on digital audio, and Steve Bress of Entropy
Engineering, another seasoned sage of multimedia, checked my chapter on
video and graciously provided his Video Fonts for Autodesk Animator. Dennis
Hardison of Animation Atlanta assisted me by using his Amiga's genlock and
time-base corrector to transfer an S-VHS animation to 3/4" videotape-at no
charge. At 3M's Optical Recording Division, Tom Kelly and Bob Deems made it
possible for me to regain the use of my eraseable optical drive. T hanks also to
the Mitsubishi Corporation for generously providing a photograph of their
multiscanning monitor.
Closer to home, Cosi and Arno cheerfully posed for the illustrations in
Chapter 10. Christin Whittington provided editorial support during early
development of the book. And Debbie Bowling and Dan Sumner provided a
kind of intangible support that has nothing to do with the words I've writ
ten, and yet without it, there might well be no such book.
T hanks to you all.
 CONTENTS AT A GLANCE

Introduction xxi

PART ONE Discovering Autodesk Animator 1

Chapter 1 Getting Acquainted with Autodesk Animator 2
Chapter 2 Using Player and Animator 14
Chapter 3 Drawing on Your Imagination 32
Chapter 4 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 50
Chapter 5 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 68

PART TWO Producing Animations 97

Chapter 6 Bringing It to Life 98
Chapter 7 Generating Titles and Credits 116
Chapter 8 Incorporating Opticals 138
Chapter 9 Editing F lies and Adding Special Effects 162

PART THREE Perfecting Presentations 187

Chapter 10 Designing Effective Presentations 188
Chapter 11 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 206
Chapter 12 Capturing and Printing Graphics 232
Chapter 13 Orchestrating Your Presentations 252

Appendix A Installing Autodesk Animator 272

Appendix B Improving Performance 278
Appendix C Additional Fonts for Animator 284

Index 293
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction xxi

PART ONE DISCOVERING AUTODESK ANIMATOR 1

Chapter 1 Getting Acquainted

with Autodesk Animator 2
Taking the First Step 6
Locating the Drawing and Inking Tools 8
Locating the Animation Tools 9
Using a Mouse I1
Summary 12

Chapter 2 Using Player and Animator 14

Using Player 16
Locating Your Files in the Directory 18
Loading and Viewing an Animation 20
Using Animation Scripts 22
W riting Your Own Script 22
Starting Animator 24
Configuring Animator 25
Undoing, Clearing, and Resetting Your Work 26
Playing the Default Flic 26
Undoing the Last Change 27
Restoring a Flic 27
Clearing the Screen 28
Starting a New Flic 28
Resetting Animator 28
Quitting Animator 29
Summary 29
xiv

Chapter 3 Drawing on Your Imagination 32

Finding Your Way 34

Selecting Items on the Home Menu 35
Changing the Current Color 36
Selecting and Replacing Tools 36
Modifying Tools 37
Blending Edges 38
Magnifying the Image with Zoom 39
Storing Temporary Images 39
Getting a Cel 40
Clearing the Key Color 41
Using the Scrape and T ile Inking Tools 42
Changing the Brush Size 44
Drawing Simple Shapes 45
Aligning Shapes with the Grid 45
Saving Your Pictures 48
Summary 48

Chapter 4 Mastering
the Drawing and Inking Tools 50

Using the Drawing Tools 52

Copying Images on the Grid 52
Using Basic Shape Tools 54
Stretching a Cel 55
Using the Unzag Tool to Remove "Jaggies" 58
Building a T itle 59
Using the Inking Tools 62
Embossing Text for a 3-D Effect 63
Adding Gradients for Glamor 64
Selecting Color from the Screen 65
Combining Images with Glass Ink 65
Summary 65
 xv

Chapter 5 Exploring
a Quarter of a Million Colors 68

Managing Your Palette 70

Drawing Multicolored Objects with Cycle Draw 70
Loading and Saving Color Files 71
Remapping Colors 73
Managing Clusters of Colors 74
Getting a Cluster 74
Reversing the Order of Colors 75
Capturing and Changing Image Colors 76
Handling Related Colors 76
Arranging Colors 77
Sorting by Luminance, Spectrum, and Gradient 78
Altering the Palette Values 78
Squeezing the Palette 79
Capturing Colors from a Cel 79
Restoring the Default Palette 79
Cutting, Pasting, and Blending Values 79
Creating Color Gradients 80
Mixing Colors and Controlling Your Palette 83
Tinting a Picture 83
Modifying Colors with Slider Bars 84
Using the RGB Slider Bars 86
Animating with a Color Cycle 87
Creating a Ramp for Color Cycling 87
Making Frames and Activating Time 89
Superimposing Images in a Flic 91
Making Smooth Color Gradients 92
Making Negative Images 94
Summary 94
xvi

PART TWO Producing Animations 97

Chapter 6 Bringing It to Life 98

Understanding Animation 100
Generating Frames for Your Production 103
Using the Tweening Tool for Animation 106
Understanding the T ime Select Functions 109
Pacing by Choreography 109
Pacing by Frame Edits 11 O
Editing Segments of Your Flic 111
Transforming Shapes 112
Summary 115

Chapter 7 Generating Titles and Credits 116

Getting Acquainted with Animator Fonts 118
Using Text Effectively 119
Keeping Text Simple 120
Justifying Text 121
Ensuring Consistency 124
W riting on the Screen 125
Changing Fonts 125
Glancing at Macros 126
Working with Fonts 128
Using the Inking Tools for Text 128
Directing Scrolling Text from the T itling Menu 130
Designing Scrolling Text 133
Mastering Scrolling Text 134
Summary 13 6

Chapter 8 Incorporating Opticals 138

Choosing an Element 141
Understanding 3-D Motion 142
Using the Optics Slider Bars 143
 xvii

Using Mouse Control 145

Using Preset Motions 146
Designing Different Types of Motion 148
Using a Cel for Your Optical Effect 150
Introducing the Element 154
Completing the Motion 155
Completing the Flic 156
Combining Optical Effects with Existing Animations 157
Summary 160

Chapter 9 Editing Flies

and Adding Special Effects 162
Safeguarding Your Work 164
Joining and Compositing Flies 165
Making a Picture into a Flic 167
Joining Two Flies 168
The Structure of a Typical Presentation 168
Writing Scripts 171
Adding Special Effects 174
Using Autodesk's Other Software 176
Using Autodesk ImageCels 176
Importing Animations from Clips 179
Using Autodesk 3D Studio 180
Summary 184

PART THREE Perfecting Presentations 187

Chapter 10 Designing Effective Presentations 188

Understanding the Presenter's Art 191
Balancing Completeness and Conciseness 192
Balancing Precision and Simplicity 192
Balancing Consistency and Novelty 193
Balancing Critical Discrimination and Restraint 193
Using Your Time W isely 194
xviii

Planning Your Presentation 195

Organizing Your Thoughts 195
Introducing Your Topic 197
Developing a Theme 198
Putting Words First 198
Optimizing Layout 199
Illustrating Your Ideas 201
Wrapping Up Your Presentation 204
Perfecting Your Pitch 204
Summary 205

Chapter 11 Recording Your

Animations on Videotape 206
Understanding the Power of Video 208
Making the Video Connection 210
Scanning the Image 212
Interlacing the Image 212
Encoding Color 213
Ensuring Good Videotape Recording 215
Ensuring Good Videotape Editing 217
Converting VGA to Video 218
Choosing Your Gear 220
Choosing a Videotape Format 222
Using Electronic Still Photography 227
Grabbing Images from Video 228
Summary 229

Chapter 12 Capturing and Printing Graphics 232

Getting Your Images on Paper 234
Using Black-and-W hite Printers 235
Using Color Printers 236
Exchanging Images with Other Software 239
Using Software for Color Printers 242
 xix

Importing High-Resolution VGA Images 243

Importing Photographs 244
Using Converter 246
Summary 249

Chapter 13 Orchestrating Your Presentations 252

Finding Audio for Video 254
Recording Audio Digitally 257
Bringing in the Sound 257
Sampling the Sound 258
Storing Your Sound 261
Editing Your Soundtrack 261
Playing the Soundtrack 264
Animating Database Access 265
Summary 270

Appendix A Installing Autodesk Animator 272

Appendix B Improving Performance 278

Appendix C Additional Fonts for Animator 284

Index 293
 INTRODUCTION

ll{
in our time, after a faltering
start, are beginning to use what may be the greatest medium ever
devised for artists-computerized animation. No other medium for
creativity has such a sublime admixture of controlled time, move
ment, drawing, painting, speech, and music.

Shamus Culhane, veteran of 60 years

of animation, in Animation from
Script to Screen

This book provides you with the hands-on experience you need to create
stunning "desktop presentations" with Autodesk Animator. Using your per
sonal computer, you will be able to bring new life to your message, whether it's
the five-year sales figures for your division or a simulation of sunlight turning
into sugar via the miracle of photosynthesis. Simply stated, Mastering Anima
tor will sharpen your skills as a director, designer, and producer of animated
presentations. The book approaches Autodesk Animator (Animator for short)
from the perspective of today's communications professional, opening the
door to a storehouse of video tools designed for effective presentations. This
book intends to show why Autodesk's advertising for Animator can confidently
predict, "It'll move you."
This book contains many examples chosen for their learning value,
artistic interest, or sheer simplicity. Some of them may interest you because
they can be incorporated into your own business presentations. Others are
stimulating to watch or to work with; perhaps they will provide an offbeat
source of inspiration. These examples will guide you through most of Ani
mator's sophisticated illustration and image-processing tools. Whether your
interest is in special effects, scrolling text, or objects that zoom around the
screen, you're likely to find something new and provocative here.
You will use these tools in meaningful applications, not just for the
sake of using them-a break from the tradition established by the early
books on Animator. Putting the tools and techniques into a meaningful con
text is just one of the things that makes this book different. In fact, there are
two ways this book provides a deeper understanding of Animator: in its
treatment of hardware, and in its treatment of software.
In keeping with the successful Sybex philosophy of software instruc
tion, this book is not meant to render your manuals utterly obsolete, so
xx ii

don't throw your documentation away. Oddly enough, I believe that one of
the stronger features of this book is what it chooses not to cover. It steers
clear of some animation tools that don't meet the typical communication
goals of most readers or that could be potential stumbling blocks for the
newcomer. Consider traditional Hollywood-style eel animation. Most Ani
mator users are not intent on becoming the next Walt Disney or Fritz
Freling, and their employers wouldn't give them the years of development
necessary for that. Accordingly, this book doesn't cover the esoteric eel ani
mation tools in the Trace Menu, which are in general useful only to an expe
rienced animator of hand-drawn eels. On the other hand, this book shows
how you can achieve much of the power of hand-drawn eel animation using
the powerful automated animation tools in the Optics and Tween menus.
Likewise, the Optics chapter doesn't clamor for your attention with a
lengthy analysis of the many minor features of the Optics menus, because
these are easily learned by hands-on use. Reading about them would only
lead to needless confusion and intimidation. I could have consulted books
on mathematics and physics and given you more than you wanted to know
about center of gravity and descriptions of rotation. But your body and its
reflexes )lave their own instincts about these things, as proven by the popu
larity of video arcade games. Since I trust your instinct more than my own
skill as a writer, I will show you to the control panel and get you started;
from there, you (or your animated subjects) will soon be flying.
In a similar spirit, the reader of this book need not endure a paragraph
on every one of Animator's 22 drawing and 26 inking tools. Instead, you
will learn by doing. We will start with the basic geometric figures, add the
image-processing powers of Animator's inking tools, and complete an early
black-and-white TV test pattern. Then, like broadcast TV itself, we will
graduate to color. By the time you're ready to animate, you will be confident
enough to explore on your own the 572 possible drawing/inking tool com
binations, and the use of the Mask tool as well, which you will find to be in
some ways analogous to our discussion of the Grid tool.
This book covers Animator's central role in a growing family of prod
ucts from Autodesk's new Multimedia Division. No discussion of Animator
would be complete without some mention of 3D Studio, Autodesk's new
high-end 3-D animation package. If you enjoy using Animator but some
times feel constrained by its resolution limitations, not to mention its con
finement to "flat" objects such as eels, you will find 3D Studio quite an
exciting development. This book will give you a glimpse into the modeling,
rendering, and animation powers of 3D Studio.
 xx iii

As for multimedia hardware, this book attempts to cover that bewildering

field like none other. While Autodesk Animator has proven to be a revolution
ary product in many ways, to me, one of its most striking qualities is the way it
inspires people to try to do things with an IBM AT-compatible that the computer
was never really designed to do-such as laugh, sing, rhapsodize, and capture
video images . Remodeling a dull grey-flannel business machine as a modern
audiovisual nerve center is not a task to be undertaken lightly. To prevent costly,
time-consuming, and frustrating errors, you must first understand the nature of
digital audio and digital video. I hope that this book will prove an indispensable
resource in that regard. As an International Television Association member, I
stay in touch with professional practices in corporate video, and I've been able
to learn how video professionals approach the problems of shooting, editing,
and duplicating video. One special goal of this book is to make sure that if
you've chosen videotape as your medium, you will get the highest production
values possible with your budget .
How can you print color images developed in Animator? How can you
not only record but edit decent looking animation sequences on videotape?
How can you add soundtracks to your productions? For the first time, you
will see some fairly detailed answers to these questions in the pages of this
book, and moveover, you will learn how Animator is being incorporated
into comprehensive hypermedia environments for the presentation of
ideas, such as ASK* ME 2000 and IconAuthor. Perhaps this represents the
ultimate fate of Animator: to act as the "animation editor" for a hypermedia
environment.
Unlike the first books on Animator, this one speaks directly to you, the
professional communicator, the most important user of Autodesk Animator.
It was written with the understanding that you don't simply want to make
an isolated animation sequence (in Autodesk terminology, "a flic"), but you
want to make a point. You're building presentations, not twenty-second
movies. Accordingly, we will cover successful strategies for presentation,
with a distinct emphasis on how Animator can be used to meet those goals.
When you're watching your first self-produced, full-featured "flic,"
you may feel like a mouse on a mountaintop, guiding comets across the
heavens. But in the throes of creation, you may feel the frustration of a sor
cerer's apprentice who can't find the magic word to prevent an "animated"
broom from dumping pails of water into an already-flooded basement.
When you've mastered several of Animator's tools, you may feel like a smug
and wiley coyote sailing off the edge of a cliff in a flying machine-only to
find, with a sudden sinking feeling , that you forgot to master one critical fea
ture that proves to be your project's downfall. That's why this book was
xxiv

written: so you can have the comets without the calamity and flights of
imagination without failure.
As demonstrated by the release of such related software as the Auto
desk Animator Clips and 3D Studio, and the anticipated release of more
broadcast-quality animation software, you will find that totally mastering
the possibilities of Autodesk Animator is an ongoing process, not one that
can be entirely captured between the pages of a book. But as they say in Hol
lywood, a movie of a thousand frames begins with frame one, and Animator
is likely to form the starting point of Autodesk's PC-animation line for many
years to come. Well, then, perhaps this isn't just a book, it's an adventure!
DISCOVERING
AUTODESK
ANIMATOR
CHAPTER

ONE

GETTING
ACQUAINTED
WITH AUTODESK
ANIMATOR
 O ver the past six or seven years, quite
a few business-presentation programs for IBM PC-compatible computers
have been developed, and some have enjoyed enormous popularity. But
there has never been anything with the visual impact of Autodesk Animator.
Autodesk Animator (Animator for short) is a full-featured drawing program,
a sophisticated painting program, a graphics-conversion program, and most
of all, a fully equipped, personal animation studio.
Consider how other programs limit you to circles, boxes, and other
simple shapes. Animator allows you to construct complex shapes with its 22
drawing tools, such as the Poly (polygon) drawing tool. Other programs allow
you to fill shapes with solid color or with simple textures. Animator provides
26 inking tools, several of which display quite a bit of native intelligence. These
''inks'' are actually a collection of image-processing programs, some of which
probably first appeared on expensive industrial workstations.
Some presentation programs offer four, eight, or sixteen colors, drawn
from a palette of 64 color choices. Animator allows 256 colors on-screen at
once, drawn from 262, 144 color possibilities. If you've never really seen
the power of Animator's depth and subtlety of color choices, I think you
will be pleasantly surprised.
Finally, many presentation progras allow you to make primitive slide
shows from your graphs, charts, and clip art. Animator offers five types of
animation that were formerly the exclusive domain of professional anima
tion studios, at least until th at
groundbreaking source of computer graphics
known as the Amiga computer came along. Once you have acquired Anima
tor, though, and some of the new solutions for adding sound to your com
puter (mentioned in Chapter 13), you need never sneak another envious
glance at the Amiga.
But don't take my word for any of this; it's easy enough to see for your
self if your PC-compatible computer has a Video Graphics Array display card
(known as a VGA card) and a VGA monitor. That is the primary requirement
for running Animator; Animator will not run on a PC equipped with a CGA,
EGA, or monochrome display adapter. If you have one of these, you must
replace it with a VGA card before running Animator.
Several new products allow you to record your animations on video
tape, such as the Magni Systems VGA Producer card, which converts the sig
nals from your VGA card into the format used by VCRs and television
 Getting Acquainted with Autodesk Animator 5

monitors (see Figure 1.1). Likewise, there are a few VGA monitors that will
accept both ordinary VGA signals and television signals, such as the Mitsu
bishi 1381AUM multiscanning monitor (see Figure 1.2).

NOTE
Nothing need prevent you from enj oying this book before pur
chasin g Autodesk Animator and the required VGA card and moni
tor. As a matter of fact, if you read this book before running
Animator, you can save a lot of time that y ou might consume in
random experimentation. This book provides a solid framework
for more directed, productive experimentation, and I hope that it
will even suggest a few ideas to the ran animator.
vete

Other minimal requirements for running Animator include an AT-class

computer (that is, a computer based on the Intel 80286 microprocessor
chip) and a 20Mb (megabyte) hard disk. Yes, you could run Animator on an
IBM XT-class computer (a computer having an Intel 8086 microprocesso r) ,

and yes, you could run it with smaller hard disk, such as a IOMb disk, but

Figure 1.1: T he Magni Systems VGA Producer card

6 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ONE

Figure 1. 2: The 13-inch Mitsubishi 138 lAUM multiscanning monitor

accepts both VGA input and television signals.

save yourself the frustration of trying to run this large and powerful pro
gram under such cramped conditions. Animator is meant to enjoy, not to
struggle with!

TAKING THE FIRST STEP

The first step is to get acquainted with the various programs on the
Animator distribution disks, because Animator itself is only one of several. If
you haven't yet installed Animator, this would be a good time. Turn to
Appendix A for assistance and meet me back here. If you have any difficulty
loading the software from the floppy disks or problems in making Animator
run for the first time, there's a bit of troubleshooting advice in Appendix A.
Are you all set? Then let's look at the contents of your hard disk.
You've most likely installed Animator on drive C, in a directory called aa.
(Following standard MS-DOS jargon, we will say that Animator's "path
 Getting Acquainted with Autodesk Animator 7

name'' is c:\aa.) To run Animator, it's best to change to Animator's directory

by entering:

cd c:\aa

Since we want to locate the executable programs (those with the EXE exten
sions) enter the following command:

dir * .exe

NOTE
In this book, to enter a command means to type that command
and press the Return key. (The Return key on your keyboard might
be labelled Enter. They are the same key.) Any time you see an
instruction for entering a command, use of the Return (or Enter)
key is taken for granted. Remember that MS-DOS is not case
sensitive; it accepts either the lower- or upper-case version of
commands and path names.

MS-DOS will display all the files that can be run as programs. They are
as follows:

FILENAME COMMON NAME SIGNIFICANCE

AA.EXE Animator Allows you to create,
modify, and view pictures
and animations.

AAPLAY.EXE Player Allows you to distribute

animations and pictures.

CONVERT.EXE Converter Translates pictures and

animations from other
formats or other
computers.

FLIMAKER.EXE Flimaker Translates AutoCAD pie-

tures and animations.

UNPACK I.EXE and (resource files) These files provide a

UNPACK2.EXE wealth of pictures, fonts,

and animations in a com-

pressed format.
8 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ONE

Animator you already know; what about the others? Player is a play
only version of Animator suitable for distribution on a floppy disk. Since it's
something of a stripped-down version of Animator, there's less clutter in the
menus to confuse a new user. We will actually take a peek at Player in Chap
ter 2 before we ever run Animator itself.
There are two programs for converting pictures and animations. Flimaker
accepts pictures and animations from Autodesk's famous AutoCAD Computer
Aided Design program. The name Flimaker is a tongue-in-cheek misspelling of
the word "filmmaker," with a nod towards Animator'sjlic file format for stor
ing animation. Since Flimaker is limited to converting AutoCAD drawings and
animations, few readers of this book will be interested in using it, and it's cov
ered quite adequately in your Animat. or Reference Manual.
The Converter program, on the other hand, has remarkable versatility.
Converter is actually the quickest way to bring high-quality images into
your animations. These pictures can come from captured video, black-and
white or color scanners, or the graphics screens generated by various MS
DOS application programs. Converter will even accept certain kinds of
pictures and animations from the Amiga, Atari ST, and Macintosh.
That leaves the two UNPACK programs, which are real oddities. W hen
you execute these files, the decompression program inside them restores
their compressed picture, font, and animation files back to their original size
for storage on your hard disk.
Altogether, we can assign your software the following roles in helping
you produce animations:

Producer Animator

Distributor Player

Importer Converter, Flimaker

Best Supporting Actor The MS-DOS operating system

LOCATING
THE DRAWING AND INKING TOOLS

Animator's tools are found in various menu panels. A menu panel

combines features from ordinary word-based menus with graphic icons. For
instance, one choice on Animator's central menu panel is a box with the
 Getting Acquainted with Autodesk Animator 9

word Fill, while other choices can be found in a row of boxes holding differ
ent colors (see Figure 1.3). To fill a region on the drawing screen with a spe
cific color, you will use the mouse to select the Fill box (which we will call a
button) , then a color box, and then the region on the drawing screen.

Figure 1.3: The Home menu panel

The central menu panel is called the Home menu. Note that in our illus
trations, the drawing screen behind the menu panel is often filled with
white to improve its printed appearance, but the usual color for your empty
screen will be black. The text line at the top of the screen is the Home menu
bar. Each word in this line (Animator, Flic, Pie, Cel, Trace, Swap, and Extra)
represents a drop-down menu that contains additional choices.
The drawing screen in Animator is located behind its menus, which
partially obscure it. To have drawing and inking access to the entire screen,
you can make the menus temporarily disappear by clicking the right button
of your mouse.
The Fill function is categorized as a drawing tool. How it behaves
depends a great deal on the kind of "ink" you've selected. If you choose to
fill the area with Opaque ink, then it becomes the same color as the ink in
your imaginary ''brush.'' But if you choose Glass, more interesting effects
are possible. You can create the illusion of objects made of glass after a little
practice with this tool, as you will see later on.

LOCATING THE ANIMATION TOOLS

If you've studied the Home menu panel, you're probably wondering
where Animator is hiding the animation functions. They're not actually hid
den so much as they are simply kept tucked away until needed. Animator
10 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ONE

provides five types of animation: color cycling, tweening, titling, optical

effects, and eel animation.
Color cycling flashes a cycle of colors through a region, like the "jet
stream" animation on TV weather charts. It's the simplest and most limited
type of animation, but in this book, you will learn how to use it effectively.
Tweening is a way to smoothly transform one shape into another.
Autodesk uses the example of a hummingbird changing into a kite.
Titling is something everyone will want to use, since pictures and
words make an unbeatable combination, and every animation should have
titles and credits.
Optical effects are now familiar to anyone who watches television.
They allow you to toss a picture into space as if it were a tumbling, spinning
card. Such an image can zoom towards you, flip over, and stretch like a sheet
of rubber. Best of all, a full-motion animation can work its magic inside the
moving card.
Finally, eel animation allows you to create a movie one frame at a time,
in the time-honored tradition of Warner Brothers and Disney. Cel anima
tions can be among the simplest or most complicated animation projects
you will do with Animator.
In broad terms, here's where you will be doing much of your work:

ACTIVITY LOCATION

Drawing The Home menu panel

Inking The Home menu panel

Color mixing The Palette menu panel

Playing animations The Home menu panel and several other

panels

Color cycling The Palette menu panel

Making optical effects The Optics menu panel

Cel animation The Cel and Trace menus

Titling The Titling menu panel

Tweening The Poly and Spline tool option menus

Even if you're unsure of some of these terms, press on. You will soon
find yourself qu ite comfortable with all of them. I won't hold up your
experimentation by stopping to visit each of these menus now; there's
plenty of time to get to know each one as we need it.
 Getting Acquainted with Autodesk Animator 11

USING A MOUSE

You don't need a mouse to view pictures and animations, only to

create them. In Chapter 2 we will operate Player from the keyboard without
requiring that you (or audiences for any animations that you distribute on
floppy disk) even own a mouse. But you should bone up now on Animator's
conventions for mouse input to prepare ahead of time for your drawing and
painting sessions in the coming chapters.

TIP
Animator can also use a Summasketch MM1201 digitizing tablet
instead of a mouse. I definitely prefer the Summasketch tablet; to
me, it's a more natural drawing tool, and Summagraphics Corpo
ration has announced an Animator template that fits on the tablet
to guide you in making menu choices. For instructions on using
the MM1201 tablet, see your Animator Reference Manual.

Animator, at least most of the time, follows some common conven

tions for using a mouse. You will find that Animator's white crosshair cursor
follows the movements of mouse precisely. T hat's rule number one; here are
some others. (Note that in general these conventions apply both to the
menus and to the events on the drawing screen.)

To choose an item, move your cursor onto the item and press/
release the left mouse button quickly enough to make a click. T his
is known as clicking.

To activate a choice, move your cursor over the item and

swiftly click twice with the left mouse button. This is known
as double-clicking.

To change a selection, move your cursor over the item and click on
the right mouse button. This is known as right-clicking.

To move or resize an object, hold down the left mouse button while
completing the action. This is known as dragging.

Like many other windowing programs, Animator responds to these

actions in obvious ways. You've noticed that the buttons on the menu panels
12 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ONE

are black and grey. W hen selected, a button is filled with white, and the text
turns red to reassure you that Animator has registered your choice. Like
wise, when a menu option is not available for use, its text turns grey. Items
that are currently in a state of change are surrounded by a flickering box
known as a marquee box (the term comes from the glittering lights on the
marquees of old movie theaters). As long as you see the marquee box , you
can continue to modify the item .

NOTE
There's a very good reason for not having colors in the menus.
Since black and grey contain no color, they can be displayed more
clearly on a television set. The process of converting images from
the VGA card into a television signal always results in some degree
of smearing and unevenness (even with the best equipment) wher
ever color is present.

For quick reference, here are these conventions again:

SITUATION APPEARANCE

Selected Item brighter than the surroundings

Unavailable Item greyer than the surroundings

State of Item surrounded by flickering marquee box

change

There you have it: a brief overview of Animator.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we've analyzed what makes Animator different from

conventional presentation programs such as Harvard Graphics or Power
Point. We talked about Animator's unique advantages in terms of drawing
and inking tools, its incredible color richness, and its biggest strength: the
five modes of animation.
 Getting Acquainted with Autodesk Animator 13

We've discussed the strict requirement for a VGA card and the practical
significance of using a fast computer with a hard disk. Those are the minimal
hardware requirements for running the software, except for the additional
requirement of a mouse (or a digitizer table) when you're creating pictures and
animations.
We've loaded Animator, Player, Converter, and Flimaker from the dis
tribution disks and sorted out what's what. W ithout actually running Ani
mator, you've gotten oriented to its Home menu panel, and you know how
to select the drawing and inking tools, how to liberate the drawing screen
from the scene-stealing menus, and how to use the mouse.
In the next chapter, we will zoom in to examine Animator's tools in
greater detail. But let's not mix business with pleasure. It will be the general
policy of this book to keep fun in its proper place-which is top priority. In
keeping with that policy, let's load some animations using Player and see
how delightful animation can be.
CHAPTER

Two
r
.

USING
PLAYER
AND ANIMATOR
 Why start things off with a s sign
ments and homework? The best way to get introduced to Autodesk Anima
tor is to let the product itself run the show. When you installed Animator,
you loaded in several animations , and it's hard for me to believe that you
don't want to see them.
In an old-fashioned player piano , you would insert a punched roll of
paper-the " p rog ram -and it would play automatically. Now meet "player
"

video." The Player program is a play-only version of Animator that Autodesk

has thoughtfully placed in public domain. By copying Player and your anima
tions to floppy disks, you can distribute your presentations to any suitably
equipped IBM AT-compatible computer from Paris, Texas to Paris, France. Fur
thermore, Player will accept a text file called a script, which contains instruc
tions for displaying a series of images and animations. Player gives you control
over stopping, starting , and playback speed through the keyboard or a mouse.
Because of its simplicity, Player also provides the perfect introduction
to the Animator user interface: there's no need to ponder the meaning of
such odd menu titles as Swap and hesitate over using such peculiar items as
the Optics and Unblue Frame options of the Animator menus. With Player,
there's no need to be concerned about drawing, painting, or producing any
animation at all; it's just for pure viewing pleasure.
Another nice thing about Player is that it doesn't require a mouse: you can
operate it from your keyboard. This means that for the time being, you don't
have to connect a mouse to your computer, load its software driver, and verify
that it works. You can begin using Player the minute you load the Animator soft
ware, to view Autodesk's sample images and animations. Shall we?

USING PLAYER

Begin in the Animator directory (typically, c: \aa), and enter:

aaplay
 Using Player and Animator 17

This loads Player, and presents the screen shown in Figure 2 .1. This screen is
blank, except for a menu selection bar at the top, containing two selections:
Player and File. Across the bottom you will see a narrow slider control panel
for running the animation and changing its speed.
Let's explore the menu selection bar. You activate the menu items by
entering their initials: p for Player or f for File. Type p-there's no need to
press Return. The Player menu drops down. It reads: About, Quit. The
About option tells you which release you're using, which is convenient
when new versions are released. To see this message, press a; to make it dis
appear, press Return. The Quit option allows you to end your Player session.
If you press q, you'll be asked:

Exit Player Program?

The answers are y for "yes" and n for "no"; they are the only possible
responses. If you see this message, press n.

Figure 2 .1: The initial Player screen. Your screen will be black, but we
found it easier to print this image with a white screen.
18 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWO

LOC ATING YOUR

F ILES IN THE DIRECTORY

We want to load a file, so first we must locate the file in your directory.
Type f for File, and the File Menu will drop down as in Figure 2.2. The File
menu reads:

FU LOAD.. .

GIFLOAD.. .

SCRIPT LOAD...

The triple-dot notation means that these options lead to new menus. Let's
load a still image, known in Animator as a pie. Pie files have GIF filename exten
sions. Press g for GIF.

Figure 2.2: The File menu

 Using Player and Animator 19

NOTE
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format and is a trademark of
CompuServe, the inventor of this format.

Now you will see the Load a Picture? menu panel (see Figure 2.3). On
the left is a directory of GIF files; in the middle is a series of buttons that rep
resent all available disk drives. On the right, you will see a form that can be
filled out to select the file. You can do two kinds of things in the Load a Pic
ture? panel: (1) you can fill out the form on the right, or (2) you can scroll
through the file directory on the left and select a file directly by clicking on
its name. You switch between these modes by pressing the Tub key.
There should be a heavy black cursor in the File box. T his cursor indi
cates that the box is ready to accept input. If the cursor is in one of the other
boxes, press Tab until it returns to the File box. If you see a thin vertical line

Figure 2.3: T h e Load a Picture? menu panel

20 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWO

instead of a heavy cursor, this means you're in the disk-drive entry mode.
Player is waiting for you to choose a disk-drive button or scroll through the
directory.
Before we load anything, let's examine the directory. Press Tab, and the
heavy cursor will become thin. Now you can change drives by typing in the let
ter for that drive (for instance, A, B, or C). Don't change drives if you al
ready see files in the directory box. Instead, scroll through the directory by
pressing the i (down-arrow) key. The down-arrow icon (the kind seen on eleva
tors) will illuminate as you scroll down. Scroll up with the t (up-arrow) key. The
left- and right-arrow keys have no function here. To return to the text-entry
boxes, press Tab.
W hen you see the heavy cursor in the File box, type in the name of any
GIF file that strikes your fancy. You need not type in the GIF extension, but it
won't hurt if you do. Press Return. That loads the picture. To load another
picture, press f for File and start again from the top.
I can't emphasize too strongly the importance of what you've just
learned. The user interface for a file-management menu panel is much the
same, whether you're loading or saving pictures, animations, fonts, text
files, palette settings, or practically anything that Animator loads and saves
as a file .

TIP
In Player, a pie remains somewhat obscured by the menu selection
bar and slider controls. If this is objectionable, you can load the pic
ture into Animator and save it as a single-frame animation. Player will
display such an animation without displaying the menus. Or you can
press the spacebar to temporarily remove the menus.

LOADING AND VIEWING AN ANIMATION

Now that you know how to use some of the most important parts of
the Animator user interface, let's press on to animation.

1. Type f twice, once for File and again for Flic. You will see the Load
an Animation? panel, just like the Load a Picture? panel. Your direc
tory should contain several FLI files. Type the name of one that
 Using Player and Animator 21

sounds good into the Files box; you need not add the FLI extension
(it will already be waiting inside the Wildcard box). Press Return.
T hat loads the flic.

2. You will see the first frame of the flic. (If the flic has an empty first
frame, your screen will still be black.) Let's examine the narrow
slider-control panel at the bottom of the screen, as shown in Fig
ure 2.4.

T he slider control on the left contains the number of images, or

frames, in your animation. It is flanked by arrows: up, sideways,
and down. T hese correspond to the controls given in Table 2 .1.

3. To start the animation, press Return. To stop the animation, press

the spacebar. To load another animation, press f twice and then
supply the filename. Have fun, explore, call up some friends and
show them what Animator can do! To end your session, press p for
Player and q for Quit.

Figure 2 .4: T he slider-control panel

Table 2.1: Flic Control Icons.

ACTION KEY
First frame t
Last frame !-
Forward -+

Backward +--

Play >>(Return)
22 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWO

USING ANIMATION SCRIPTS

In this exercise, you will do something that the Animator Reference

Manual treats as an advanced topic: you will write a script that links several
small animations together into something closer to a "major production."
Writing a script is amazingly easy to do: All it involves is the ability to type!
Our real treatment of scripts is at the end of this book, but the natural place
to introduce you to them is here.
An Animator script is a simple ASCII text file. Such files may not con
tain any of the control characters or escape sequences that word processors
sometimes embed in documents for format control (such as headers and
footers, holding, underlining, page breaks, and so on). For this reason, if
you're editing a script file, it is important to use a special "save-as-ASCII"
option in your favorite word processor (for instance, the ''Text In/Out'' fea
ture of WordPerfect; I prefer to use the "document" option in the Quick
Basic text editor). You can also write scripts in Animator's Text tool: these
scripts will be saved in the proper format automatically.
The structure of a script is simple: it consists of a series of commands,
each occupying its own line (put another way, each command line is fol
lowed by Return). The commands are simple, too: in the most common
form, a command to run an animation file is simply its name. For instance, to
run the hands flic, the command would be hands.tli. There are various
options, such as speed settings, but the following example is sufficient to
show you the simplicity of a script:

hands.fli

mrnumo.fli

tigercat.fli

loop6

WRITING YOUR OWN SCRIPT

Want to try it for yourself? In the example above, I'm assuming that
you have the required flies in the same directory as Player, since they are
 Using Player and Animator 23

loaded in by the Animator installation program. If not, you will have to pro
vide the full path name for each flic that must be run.

1. Start your favorite text editor in the accustomed way. Enter the
script listed above . Save the file as scripta.txt, using the "DOS
file" or "ASCII" option of your editor, and being sure to place it
in the same directory as Player (usually: c:\aa).
2. Exit your editor and change to the Player directory by entering
cd c:\aa. Then enter: aaplay scripta.txt.
Player will run your script automatically. You can stop a flic at any
time with the Backspace key. Take a few minutes to experiment
with the keys shown in Table 2.2.

3. To quit, enter p for Player and q for Quit .

Table 2.2: Flic Control Keys.

ACTION KEY

Freeze frame Backspace

Start Enter
First frame t
Last frame .j.
Forward one -+

Backward one +-

Slower + (plus sign)

Faster - (minus sign)

Fastest Fl
Slower 3 F2
Slower 6 F3
Slower 9 F4
Slower 12 F5
Slower 18 F6
Slower 24 F7
Slower 36 FB
Slower 48 F9
Original speed FlO

Quit reruns Esc

24 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWO

Having reached this point, you have mastered in a very relaxed way
the fundamentals of Animator's user interface for running animations
without drawing a single line or generating a single frame. If you haven't yet
experimented with Animator on your own, this provided you a chance to
explore the power of this new medium right out of the box. This practice
was designed to bring you up to speed with the menu conventions without
even peeking at Animator itself. By all means, let's do that now.

STARTING ANIMATOR

This section serves as a reference for basic Animator operations, such

as starting the program, undoing changes, clearing the graphics screen, and
understanding and managing files.
To start Animator, enter:

c:\aa\aa

NOTE
These commands accomplish the following: (a) they place you in
the C drive, (b) they specify the aa directory, and (c) they specify
that aa.exe is the program to be executed.

W hen Animator begins, it usually loads many items that were saved as
you last used them, including your most recent:

Animation

Picture

Palette settings

Drawing tool choices

Inking tool choices

The last graphics screen you worked on is loaded, overlaid with t he

menu seleccor bar and the Home menu panel (see Figure 2.5). If you haven't
 Using Player and Animator 25

saved any screens, this area will be black. The Horne menu panel is divided
into various sections, which in this book will be called:

Drawing tools (left)

Palette tools (center, top)

Flic-Control icons (center, bottom)

Inking tools (right)

Mode settings (far right)

Figure 2.5: The initial Animator screen. It's easier for us to print a white
graphics screen, but y ours will usually be black when empty.

CONFIGURING ANIMATOR
If you're starting Animator for the first time, it will tell you that you need
to configure it for your particular setup; Chapter 1 of the Animator Reference
26 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWO

Manual explains how. If your needs change after you've been working with
Animator, you can reconfigure Animator using the Configure option of the
Extra menu. You will then encounter the Configure menu described in the Ani
mator Reference Manual. You will find it particularly useful if your mouse isn't
working , or if you're using a digitizer tablet instead of a mouse.

UNDOING, CLEARING,
AND RESETTING YOUR WORK

It is strange that one of the greatest benefits of the computer, whether

you're processing text, page layout, or graphics, is what it allows you to
undo. Animator has the following features for allowing you to undo things
you wish you hadn't done, or to start afresh.

IF YOU WANT TO . . THEN USE THE...

Undo last change to a pie Undo button on the Drawing tools

menu

Undo all since loading Restore option in the Pie menu

Clear the screen and start Clear option in the Pie menu
over

Delete all frames New option in the Flic menu

Reset Animator to default.fix Reset option in the Flic menu

conditions

Your first Animator tutorial will oddly enough be concerned with how
to undo things. If you're not already sitting in front of the Home menu, start
up Animator and we will try out these features.

PLAYING THE DEFAULT FLIC

One unusual feature of Animator is the way it remembers what you

were doing in previous sessions; for instance, it keeps a snapshot of the lat
est picture and flic you were working on. These items, along with many
 Using Player and Animator 27

other details, such as the last color and the last Drawing tool you were using,
are maintained in various files known as default files.
If you have already been using Animator for a while when you read
this, you probably have noticed how your latest flic automatically appears
when you start Animator. But there is an option in the Configure menu
called Save Default.fix that allows you to prevent the last flic from being
automatically loaded. This is particularly handy if your last flic was a large
one and you don't want to spend time loading it every time you start work
ing on another flic.
If you haven't had much experience with Animator, it's easy to forget
that Animator automatically loads your last flic (unless you specifically con
figure it not to do so, as described above). This is even harder to remember if
your flic begins with an entirely black screen. For instance, Autodesk's
Tigercat.fli flic has an initial screen that is black. When this flic is loaded, it
looks the same as if you had used the New option to remove the default flic.
However, if Tigercat.fli is loaded, you will see that tabby cat run across the
screen when you press Return or double-dick on the Play icon (the double
arrow icon that resembles the Play button on a VCR).

UNDOING THE LAST CHANGE

Your Draw and Opaque buttons should be highlighted now, and the
Current Color slot-the box on the extreme right of the Home menu
should contain some color other than black. draw something on the screen
by dragging the cursor. Then select undo from the drawing tools. The item
will vanish. Draw it again, and this time draw a second item. Select Undo
again. Notice how only the second item vanishes; now you're stuck with the
first item. Some graphics programs have multiple levels of undo, but Anima
tor will only undo the last change, unless you turn to a more radical way to
undo, known as Restore.

RESTORING A FLIC

Restore will undo all changes made to the current frame since loading.
Why am I suddenly talking about an animation frame when you thought you
were drawing on Animator's drawing screen? Well, remember what I said
earlier: Animator ordinarily keeps a default flic in memory. That blank
screen you've been drawing on is not necessarily just a drawing screen: it
28 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWO

may well be the first frame of a flic, unless you choose New from your Flic
menu right after starting Animator. To see this for yourself, do the following:
now that you have some drawing on your screen you can't erase, select the
Play icon again . This time, while your current flic runs, your drawing will
flicker on the screen.

TIP
If there is any number besides '' l '' in the frame ID box at the bot
tom center of your Home menu, this is a sure sign that you have a
flic in your workspace.

To get rid of the marked-up flic, choose the Restore option on the Pie
menu. Note that Restore works only if you haven't moved to another frame.

CLE ARING THE SCREEN

You will use this option often; it allows you to blank the screen. The
screen will be whatever color happens to be in the key slot.

WARNING
Remember, if you have a flic in memory, you've just cleared one of
its frames! If you have a valuable /Uc in memory, make sure
you've saved a copy of it before using Clear.

STARTING A NEW FLIC

You can erase the flic currently in memory and start over with a new
flic (consisting of a single frame) using the New option. The current tool
choices and colors will remain unchanged.

RESETTING A NIMATOR

The most radical level of "undo" in Animator is to reset the program

entirely. This restores many Animator settings, such as the tools, inks, and
 Using Player and Animator 29

palette, to the way they were when you first loaded it onto your hard disk.
See the Animator Reference Manual for more detail concerning which
items are reset and which are maintained after Reset. A common use of Reset
is to standardize practices from one animation session to another, particu
larly in training and in the development of new techniques.

QUI TTING ANIMATOR

To stop Animator: press a for Animator and q for Quit. Or if you prefer
to use the mouse , click on the Animator menu and then on its Quit option. If
you have unsaved changes, Animator will tell you so and ask you to verify
that you want to quit. If you have not made changes, it will still ask you to
verify that you want to exit. Indicate y for yes or n for no either with your
mouse or the appropriate key.

TIP
Having trouble getting the menus back? If the menu-selection bar
and Home menu panel are not on the scree n , righ t-c li ck with the
mouse cursor on the drawing screen until they appear.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, you were able to sit back and learn from the Autodesk
animations without lifting an artistic finger. You learned how to locate your
files in a directory and how to load them for viewing. You've learned all the
keyboard and mouse conventions for playing back flies with the Player pro
gram. This knowledge allows you to move freely to any frame of an anima
tion, a skill that will be crucial when you're fine-tuning your own
animations in Animator itself.
Already, you've gotten the jump over anyone plodding through the
Autodesk manuals, because at this stage , you've written your first script.
30 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWO

That's something that the Animator manual doesn't teach you until the very
end. We will be returning to the subject of scripts later.
You can now not only start and stop Animator, but you're an expert in
how not to do things, and that is not a bad talent. You probably know that
already from your experience with word processors, where it's important
to know how to delete passages, cancel whole editing sessions, or undo mis
takes. If you think of Animator as a word processor for animation, then you
know how to perform analogous tasks for your flies. You know how to use
Undo, Restore, Clear, and Reset, and how to start a new file.
You're aware of the usual presence of a flic, and you know that a flic
can be defaced by drawing and inking if you don't realize that your drawing
screen may in fact be one frame of an animation. Therefore, you're aware
that you should save all flies during various stages of development, to pre
vent accidents.
All of these things are important milestones in your mastery of Anima
tor, even though you haven't made any pictures yet. W ith these basics out of
the way, we're free to do just that in Chapter 3.
CHAPTER

THREE

DRAWING
ON YOUR
IMAGINATION
 This chapter will introduce you to
Animator's drawing, ink, and palette tools with an actual project: recreating
a small part of the legendary "Indian Head" test pattern from the 1960s. But
first, we will do a bit of free-form experimentation.

FINDING YOUR WAY

Because of the warm-up in Chapters 1 and 2, the Home menu should

not seem an unfamiliar place; you already know how to draw on the screen,
choose colors, and perform recovery measures if you change your mind
about edits. Now you can break out Animator's toolchest, where you will
find quite a variety of powerful drawing and inking tools.
If you've been using Animator, your Home menu may not look as it did
when you first started Animator, but that's okay. If you've been working
with Animator, you already know how to select and replace tools.
First, reset Animator completely, using the Reset option of the Flic menu.
Then check to see whether your menu provides the settings described below. If
this is not the case , it's easy to set them up, as in Figure 3 .1.

The cluster box, which contains the range of colors in the center of
the Home menu panel, should be filled with a rainbow.

Figure 3.1: The Home menu panel

 Drawing on Your Imagination 35

The current color should be sky blue.

The sky blue slot in the Mini-Palette should be framed in red.

The Drawing Tools menu should contain the following buttons (in
addition to the Home title button) :

Draw
Box
Zoom
Poly
Text
Undo
Spray
Fill

The Inking Tools menu should contain the following icons:

Opaque
Vgrad
Glass
Scrape
Soften
Tile

The Brush Size icon (the small dot beside the Current Color slot)
should be set for the finest brush size.

The F (fill) button should be on.

SELECTING I TEMS
ON THE HOME MENU

A cluster box is simply a handy way to keep plenty of colors on hand.

Animator provides two cluster settings called A and B. By default (in other
words, until you customize your cluster boxes) , the A cluster contains the
grey shades from black to white, and B contains a spectrum of rainbow col
ors. In the following inking exercises, we will use the B cluster, and then
later we will use the A cluster.
36 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THREE

CHANGING THE CURRENT COLOR

When using a paintbrush, the color of your paint is more or less obvi
ous; you simply hold it up to your face and squint at it if you need to be reas
sured that you've mixed kelly green rather than lime-green. The smallest
''brush'' in Animator, however, is a dot not much larger than a pinhead, and
you will find a world of difference between the visual impact of a small
speck of color and the impact of a solid area the size of a dime. Therefore,
the Home menu verifies your current color at all times in a square slot on the
far right of the menu panel.
Your current color-the color that will be used for your next action
can be changed by a click on one of the seven color slots inside the Mini
Palette or by clicking on a point inside the cluster box. For now, I will
assume that you've chosen the sky-bfoe color slot in the Mini-Palette. When
you choose a color, the slot will be framed in red and the color will be cop
ied to the Current Color slot.

SELECTING AND REPLACING TOOLS

The Home panel has room enough to display only a few of Animator's
drawing and painting tools at once, and you can activate only one drawing
tool and one inking tool at a time. T his means that you will often select
(highlight) tool buttons, right-click to obtain the Drawing or Inking Tools
menu , and then select a replacement tool from the scrolling directory. When
you replace a tool, right-click on the drawing screen to return your picture.
Here's an example. We will compare the effects of the Opaque, Glass,
Soften, and Vgrad inks on one of the simplest of shapes: the rectangle.

TIP
You can use the Clear option of the Pie menu at any time to start
over.

Select Box from the Drawing Tools menu. Your inking tool should be
Opaque. Click on the screen and drag the cursor to another position; then
click on the screen again. You should have a solid rectangle on the screen.
 Drawing on Your Imagination 37

MODIFYING TOOLS

One important aspect of using tools is modifying them as you work.

Many of the drawing and inking tools have modification options that you
can access by right-clicking on the tool button. Here's an example.
Select another color from the Mini-Palette, say orange, and select the
Glass ink. Make another box that partially overlaps the opaque box. T he
new box will resemble a sheet of reddish glass. Now explore the options of
the Glass tool as follows. Right-click on Glass, and the options menu for this
tool will appear as shown in Figure 3. 2.

Figure 3.2: The options menu for the Glass tool

There are two controls for tools such as Glass: a Dither button and an
Ink Strength slider bar. The Ink Strength is a numerical setting that controls
how much effect the inking operation will have. Change the strength to
roughly 30 by dragging the numerical slider and then return to the drawing
screen by right-clicking. Make another partially overlapping box. Change
38 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THREE

the strength again to about 8 and try making yet another box. You probably
will not see the effect this time. This is an important thing to know: the ink
ing tools are nonlinear, that is, as you make small changes to the numerical
strength setting, the resulting effect can greatly change its behavior. You
may not be impressed with the effect of Glass now, but with a realistic image
it can perform some wonderful visual tricks. We will explore the Dither
option momentarily, when we pick up the Vgrad tool.

BLENDING EDGES

One of the drawbacks to computer graphics is that at low resolution,

edges look rough or ''jaggy.'' Here's one way around that, although it's not a
good solution for all applications because it introduces a lot of blurring.
Choose the Soften ink and keep the Box tool. Repeatedly draw a Soften
box around one corner of your overlapping glass boxes and watch carefully.
You will see a blending zone arise around the edges of the colored regions.
The Soften tool is used for blurring images and can also be used to take some
of the "jagginess" out of computer images; however, the Unzag tool is usu
ally better at blending jagged edges without blurring.
Dithering is another way to break up some of the computerish look of
your images. To see an example of this, we will use Vgrad (vertical gradient). A
Vgrad box will appear as a rainbow bar if you use the rainbow cluster. (If you
use the greyscale cluster box, this box will resemble a shaded grey surface.)
Right-click on the Vgrad button, and you will see that it has a Dither
button. The Dither option is provided because of the limitations of VGA
graphics: a tool such as Glass that should produce smoothly shaded images
actually produces discretely shaded areas, where there are tiny jumps in
brightness across the screen. The human eye is exquisitely sensitive to these
changes, which are seen as annoying bands known as Mach bands. Most
optical illusions can be exploited to good effect by a clever artist, but it's
hard to find applications where Mach bands look appealing. The Dither
option helps avoid the banding effect by scrambling the contour lines. The
best way to see this is to compare dithered and undithered images at the
4-fold magnification of Zoom. Draw Vgrad boxes with Dither both on and
off, positioning them closely side by side.
Then from the Home menu, right-click on Zoom. Zoom is a permanent
toolthat can't be replaced by other tools.
 Drawing on Your Imagination 39

MAGNIFYING THE IMAGE WI TH ZOOM

When you right-click on Zoom, the menu panel shown in Figure 3.3
appears.

Figure 3.3: The Set Zoom Level menu

The default magnification for Zoom is Times 2, but you can click on
Times 4 to increase the magnification; do this now. You will return to the Home
menu. Now select Zoom, and a small marquee box will appear on the screen.
Move the marquee to cover part of the dithered and undithered boxes and click
on your mouse. At Times 4 magnification, you can clearly see the difference, as
in Figure 3 .4. Select Zoom again to return to normal view.
This concludes your first hands-on tutorial with Animator's drawing
tools. When you're ready to go on, we can explore the possibilities of hav
ing more than one canvas to paint on. If possible, it would be nice if you
could leave your work on the screen while you take a break, because we'd
like to have a common point of departure for our next lesson.

STORING TEMPORARY IMAGES

So far, your work has been exclusively concerned with Animator's

main drawing screen, but the software provides disk files for the temporary
storage of additional images: a Cel buffer and a Swap buffer. The Swap buffer
is used for one purpose: to hold a copy of an entire screen. The Cel buffer
40 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THREE

Figure 3.4: Dithered and undithered images

can also be used to hold an entire screen, but it is just as often used for stor
ing, moving, stretching, and rotating parts of an image. The Cel buffer is the
heart of Animator's extraordinary eel animation capability. Let's have a
glance at it.

NOTE
The buzzword for keeping something available temporarily is
keeping it "in a buffer."

GETTING A CEL
I'm assuming here that you've just followed the tutorial above. If not,
it would be helpful to try it out first so we have some common basis for more
 Drawing on Your Imagination 41

discussion. Choose the Cel menu and select Get. Crosshairs appear on the
screen so that you can select two diagonal corners of the picture to capture
as a eel. Position the marquee box so that you capture a part (but preferably
not all) of the layered boxes you have drawn. Click again and the marquee
disappears, but the eel is now stored in the Cel buffer.
Return to the Cel menu and select Paste. T he eel will reappear within a
marquee. To pick up the eel, click anywhere on the screen. To paste the eel
in its current position, right-click without moving the eel. To copy the eel to
a new position, move it and click. If you want to cancel the operation,
right-click .
What happens next depends a great deal on the ink. If your ink is
Vgrad, the pasted image will be replaced by some odd new colors. If your
ink is Glass, the image will be translucent and may undergo some color
change. You may find it hard even to see a Glass image at low strength. If the
ink is Opaque, the image will be pasted without change. If you like, you can
change tools and paste the same eel again and again to see the effect.

CLEARING THE KEY COLOR

You've just seen how your choice of ink affects a paste operation. Fur
thermore, the state of the Clear Key Color button (the Kbutton in the lower
right-hand corner of the Home menu) has a very important effect on the
behavior of the pasted eel . If the K button is highlighted, any part of the eel
containing the current key color will be effectively transparent.
As you use Animator, there will be countless times when you will want
to cut an object from one picture and paste it seamfessly into another. In
order to do this, the following must be true: (a) the object must be com
pletely surrounded by a solid-color background, (b) the Clear Key button
must be highlighted, and (c) the key color must be the same color as the
object's background.
Remember that the Key Color slot is the box to the left of the seven
boxes that make up the Mini-Palette . To change the key color, right-click on
the Key Color slot, and it will be framed in red. T hen click on any part of the
screen that has the color that you want to use as the key color.
Here's a typical example of your preparations for using the key color. If
the desired object is-as is usually the case-surrounded by a busy back
ground, you must choose some otherwise unused color as the key color and
completely outline the object with it before cutting it out. Otherwise, some
of the background will be transferred along with the object during the paste
operation.
42 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THREE

USING THE SCRAPE

AND TILE INKING TOOLS

You've just used the Cel function to capture part of an image. You can
also use the Ce! buffer to capture the whole screen with the Clip option on
the Cel menu. One obvious use for a eel is to form the basis of a eel anima
tion, but using Clip is also a convenient way to store a' 'frozen'' copy of your
picture at some point during development, safe from undo-able changes,
while you experiment with additions, repainting, and special effects on a
spare copy.
Using the Cel buffer simply as a screen buffer has the following draw
back: there is only one Cel buffer, and once you've committed it to clip the
screen, you can't use it for any other cutting and pasting operations, includ
ing the kinds of automated cutting and pasting that occur during animation.
For this reason, Animator provides another buffer to hold a copy of the
screen, the Swap screen. But there are other uses for the Swap screen. The
second picture need not be a version of your current masterpiece; it can just
as easily be a completely different picture, such as a complex image that can
serve as a source for eels to be pasted into your new image.
Furthermore, it's possible to combine the contents of the main and
Swap screens with an advanced image-processing tool called Scrape. In this
exercise, you will learn how to have your artistic cake and eat it, too. Let's
examine the possibilities of having two graphics screens that interact via the
Scrape and Tile inking tools.
I'm assuming here that you've been following the tutorials so far. If
not, it would be helpful to try them out before continuing so that we have a
common point of departure.
First of all, note that the Swap menu provides the following options.

IF YOU WANT TO... THEN USE ...

Clip and save the current screen Clip screen

(or animation frame)

Swap the stored screen for the Trade

current screen (or animation
frame)
Replace the current screen (or Paste
animation frame) with the screen
stored in the buffer
 Drawing on Your Imagination 43

IF YOU WANT TO... THEN USE .

Display the stored screen View

Delete the stored screen Release

First let's use the Scrape tool.

1. Choose the Swap menu from the Animator menu bar. At this point ,
Clip will be the only Swap option you can select; the others will be
greyed-out. Select Clip, and the present screen will be copied into
the Swap buffer. Go to the Pie Menu and select Clear; your drawing
screen will be erased.

2. Select the Scrape ink and draw a new box in the same place you put
the original boxes. The new screen will be "scraped" away in your
box, and the old image will show through.

3. Now we're going to capture part of the image and turn it into a eel
that will be suitable for copying and pasting into a still image or an
animation. Go to the Cel menu and select Get. The cursor will form
a crosshair. Move the cursor to the image you have revealed by
scraping and click on one corner, then move the cursor to the oppo
site corner and click again. This grabs the image as a eel.

4. Clear the screen again and select the Tile ink. You should have Box
and Tile activated now. Click on the screen to remove the Home
menu panel and create a box that covers the whole screen. The
screen will be covered, or tiled, by the repeating pattern of your
eel as in Figure 3. 5.

5. Now try something else. Right-click to get the menus back and
choose Draw. Clear the screen and start drawing. You will find your
brush scraping through the blank screen to reveal the tile pattern
underneath.

Splendid. You've just wielded some image-processing tools that were

originally available only in expensive computer graphics equipment. Spend
some time reflecting on the possibilities, and I'm sure you will find some
surprising ways to use the tiling and scraping tools. So far, I haven't advised
you to save your work, but that will change now. We're going back to the
basics-the simple drawing tools-and we will use them to produce a pic
ture that will form part of an animation by the time you've worked through
this book. We will be working with additional drawing tools on the left side
44 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THREE

Figure 3.5: The effect of the Tile ink

of your Home menu. Begin by resetting your drawing screen. Choose the
Reset option of the Flic menu. Answer Y when asked whether you really
want to reset all.

CHANGING THE BRUSH SIZE

Change the current color to white by choosing white from the Mini
Palette . Use the Fill tool to fill the screen with white. Pick out a medium grey
from the center of the cluster box.
Bring the cursor to the small dot to the left of the C urrent Color slot.
This is the Brush Size indicator. Right-click on it to change the brush size.
The Set Brush Size dialog box appears as in Figure 3.6. Drag the black slider
until it goes from size 1 to size 4. Then return to the drawing screen by right
clicking on the picture.
 Drawing on Your Imagination 45

Figure 3.6: The Set Brush Size dialog box

DRAWING SIMPLE SHAPES

Right-click on the Poly or Spray icon. The Drawing Tools menu panel
appears, with your choice highlighted. Choose Circle from the scrolling
directory to replace your original choice. Be sure to turn off the Fill switch.
Then return to the drawing screen.
Put your cursor at the center of the screen and click, dragging the cur
sor until the circle is just cut off at top and bottom, so it resembles Fig
ure 3.7.
Don't worry if your circle is not centered on the perfect pixel, but you
can choose Undo if you're not happy with the placement.

ALIGNING SHAPES WITH THE GRID

The Extra menu contains features that don't belong in the drawing and
inking toolkits. You can use its Grid feature to greatly simplify drawing ver
tical and horizontal lines, not to mention using the powerful snap-to align
ment of items on the screen.

1. Change the brush size again, moving the slider down to size 2, and
return to the drawing screen.
46 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THREE

Figure 3. 7: T he central circle in the test pattern

2. Choose the Extra menu, and select the Grid option. The Grid Snap
Control menu appears, where you should select Use (an asterisk
will appear); then select Create. The cursor will form the intersec
tion of a horizontal and vertical line. Go to about ten o'clock on the
circle and click, then drag until you touch the circle again at about
five o'clock, as in Figure 3.8. Try to make a square, but it's okay if
your shape is more rectangular. Click again, and the Grid Snap Con
trol menu reappears. Choose Paste. Choose the Exit menu, and
when the Home menu panel appears, change the brush size to 3.

3. Replace the Draw or Box tool with Line by right-clicking on either

tool and selecting Line from the Drawing Tools menu. Click again at
the ten o'clock position and drag the mouse towards five o'clock. A
diagonal line will appear; click to confirm the line. Now repeat this
step for the other diagonal, as in Figure 3.9.

4. Turn off the grid by selecting the Grid option of the Extra menu.
Click on Use. The asterisk beside the Use option will disappear,
meaning that the Grid will no longer restrict your drawing and
inking.
 Drawing on Your Imagination 47

Figure 3.8: TESTl.PIC, the elementary test pattern

Figure 3.9: This is our stopping point for the test pattern project.
48 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THREE

SAVING YOUR PICTURES

At this point you should save your drawing, because we will build on it
as we progress through the book.
Choose the Pie menu's Files option, and then the Save button. You will
see the Save a Picture? menu panel. The heavy black cursor in the File box
indicates that it is ready for you to provide a name. If the box is not empty,
press Esc to clear it. Then type in TESTl and press Return. When the file has
been saved, the Files menu will reappear. Banish it with a right-click on the
drawing screen. Now you're ready to continue drawing or quit Animator.

SUMMARY

Congratulations. You've journeyed a long way in this chapter. You

began by selecting, modifying, and replacing drawing and inking tools, as
well as colors, in the Home menu. You learned about the effect of modifying
ink strength, and the importance of blending and dithering as you color and
shade objects.
You used the Zoom tool to magnify the screen, and you will now find
yourself using this tool on a regular basis. You know about the Cel and Swap
buffers, and you can use Scrape and Tile to combine the contents of the pri
mary screen and the Swap to produce stunning effects.
I've anticipated your interest in compositing images seamlessly using
the key color, so you are practically an expert on that subject. You can also
change your brush size with a confident sweep of your mouse on the
slider bar.
You also know the importance of using the Grid function for aligning
lines, circles, rectangles, and any other objects that must be placed on the
screen precisely. And you've saved a picture that can be used later in
animation.
If these tutorials seemed like old hat to you, then you're on the express
train to animation . But if you are intrigued by what you've seen so far,
 Drawing on Your Imagination 49

you're sure to enjoy the more advanced graphics workshop coming up next.
You will meet the Indian chief who greeted millions of American TV viewers
every morning before television stations signed on, and you will use Anima
tor's most interesting tools to develop a broadcast-quality title. See you in
Chapter 4. Be sure to bring TESTl.PIC!
CHAPTER

FOUR

MASTERING
THE DRAWING
AND INKING
TOOLS

. . .

.
. .
. . '

' . . :
..

. .*'.
.
. '
'. .
.. .
 I n the last chapter, you used some
simple geometric shapes to build part of a broadcaster's test pattern. We will
continue with this project, although I don't intend to have you put in all the
work that I invested when I first copied this pattern. The idea here is to
introduce tools, not open up an art academy.
We're going to create a simplified profile of the Indian chief for which
the "Indian Head" test pattern is known. In this exercise, you will cut the
Indian chief's profile from a work screen and paste it to the TEST I screen
you developed in Chapter 3.
No doubt you recall our discussion of the key color in that chapter.
W hen you create a solid background composed of the key color, we
call this a key matte. T he term key matte harkens back to the earliest special
effects in cinema; it allows you to cut out an image having a single-color
background and paste it over another image, treating the background color
as transparent. The term matte refers to the solid background, while the key
is the particular color chosen to be treated as transparent.
Our work today will begin with copying the chiefs image from these
pages to the Animator screen. If you don't have an electronic page scanner, you
can use Michaelangelo's trick of manually transferring the image to a grid. After
this cut-and-paste session, you will use the special effects created by the Spark
and Emboss inks on an Animator font to generate a professional looking title
screen.

USING THE DRAWING TOOLS

To create an image of the chief, you can copy the drawing from this
book with the help of a grid; see the progressive examples in Figure 4 .1.

COPYING IMAGES ON THE GRID

1. Fill the screen with white. Right-click on the Key Color slot and
change the key color to white by clicking on the white box in the
 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 53

\
:
I

r-----
!
.,

Figure 4.1: To obtain the Indian head, start with drawing number 1.

Mini-Palette. The Key Color slot is the box to the left of the Mini
Palette, as shown in Figure 4.2.

2. Highlight the Clear Key button in the lower-right corner of your

screen. Choose a medium grey by right-clicking in the middle of
your cluster box. Choose the Poly tool without selecting the Filled
or 2-color option , and choose Opaque ink.

3. Go to the Extra menu and select the Grid option. Click on the Use and
Create options. The cursor will turn into a horizontal/vertical crossbar.
Draw a rectangle that is roughly 1 inch square near the center of your
screen by clicking at one corner, and then again at the next . This will
create a grid. Now choose the Paste option to fill the screen with your
grey grid and right-dick on the drawing screen to banish the Grid Snap

Control menu.

4. Select the Grid option again and turn off the grid-snap feature by
clicking on Use. For your current color, choose black. Select the
54 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FOUR

Box tool and use Brush Size 1; make a box three squares wide and
four squares tall. Using Line and Poly, trace in the chief's features,
following steps 1, 2, and 3, as shown in Figure 4.1. Fill in the out
lines with the Fill tool.

5. Capture your portrait of the chief as a eel, using the Get option of
the Cel menu, and save it with the Files option, using the filename
CHIEF.CEL.

Figure 4.2: T he Key Color slot

USING BASIC SHAPE TOOLS

Every chief worth his salt needs an elaborate head-dress. To make a

stylized head-dress, let's use the Star function to create a black-and-white
starburst pattern, and then we will reshape it to the proper configuration.

1. Clear the primary screen buffer by choosing Pie, then Clear. Make
sure the screen is still filled with white and that the Key Color slot
contains white. Right-click on a drawing tool to go to the Drawing
Tools menu, and get the Star tool. Select Filled but not 2-color.
Move the Inner Radius Ratio slider bar until it reads 7 5 and set the
number of Points to 24. Right-click on the picture to exit the Draw
ing Tools menu.

2. Set the current color to black and draw a large star in the middle of
the screen. Set the current color to white and draw another star
slightly off-center to the right inside the black star. T hen make a
smaller black star still further to the right, as in Figure 4.3.
 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 55

Figure 4.3: Off-center stars used to create a h ead dress

-

3. Finally, make another off-center star in white. Then, using the Box
tool, make filled white boxes to erase almost half of the right side of
the starburst, as shown in Figure 4.4.

STRETCHING A CEL

In the next stage, we will demonstrate the versatility of the Stretch

option in the Cel menu, one feature of Animator that you're sure to use
often. As you will see, it's possible not only to stretch an object horizontally
56 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FOUR

....

' '
Figure 4.4: The finished head-dress

and vertically, but you also can flip the object upside down or make a
mirror-image copy.

1. Check to make sure that the Key Color is white and that the Clear
Key button is highlighted. Then load the chief using the Cel Files
option. The image will appear briefly and then disappear; that's
normal. Exit the Files menu by right-clicking on the screen.

2. Choose the Stretch option from the Cel menu. The chief appears as a
partially transparent overlay in a flickering box. Resize him horizon
tally by clicking to the right of the marquee and dragging. Then resize
him vertically by clicking below the eel. You can move and resize him
as much as you like, since he won't be permanently pasted in until you
right-click on him-see Figure 4.5. Note that if you click above the eel,
 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 57

it will be flipped upside down, and if you click to the left of the eel, it
will be reversed. You will find a wealth of creative uses for such
flipped and reversed images when you need to produce symmetrical
objects such as flower vases or kitchen tables, and reflected images,
such as on the surface of a lake.

NOTE
Do you want to move the eel? Then choose the Cel menu's Move
option. Click anywhere on the screen to pick up the eel. Move to
another position. Click again to paste the eel. If you wish to cancel
the Move operation, right-click your mouse instead of clicking on the
final position.

Figure 4.5: The chief and his head-dress

58 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FOUR

3. If you inadvertantly freeze the chief in an embarassing position,

such as upside down, or if he turns out too narrow or too broad,
select Undo to remove the pasted image and then try again. W hen
he seems properly fitted into his feathers, right-click to accept the
Paste operation. Finally, go to the Cel menu and choose Get. Select
Files, then grab the entire image and save it as CHIEF2.CEL.

USING THE UNZAG

TOOL TO REMOVE "}AGGIES"

To finish our elementary version of a ''test pattern,'' we will use a tool

that is always found in high-end computer animation: the anti-aliasing (or
"unzag") option. Anti-aliasing is a process that removes the crude, jagged
look of computer graphics by smoothing out the sharp stair-steps on diago
nal lines. You will recall that we mentioned the Soften and Unzag tools,
together with the Dither options, in the last chapter. Consider these all part
of a concerted effort to improve your image!

1. Load the T ESTl.GIF picture. Set the key color to white and high
light the Clear Key button. The eel CHIEF2 should still be in the Cel
buffer; if not, load it using the Cel menu. Choose Files, then Load,
to load the eel from disk.

2. Select Stretch from the Cel menu and use it to position and resize
the Indian at the top center of the test pattern, as shown in Fig
ure 4.6.

3. Using the Unzag ink and the (filled) Box tool, enclose the chief with
an anti-aliasing operation to remove the "jaggies" and give a much
more natural television appearance. Save your picture as TEST2.

NOTE
The state of the Dither option won't greatly affect the result of
using Unzag in this example.

This ends our drawing tutorial with the Indian Head Test Pattern. Artis
tically speaking, though, we have a long way to go before the image can be
 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 59

Figure 4.6: The chief, at home inside the test pattern

considered as finished. You can go on to add many more details to repro

duce the actual test pattern, but you will need to make some clever compro
mises to compensate for Animator's rather coarse drawing resolution-after
all, the test pattern was intended to be a test of a television set's resolution,
which considerably exceeds that of Animator's graphics.
Before you put away your black-and-white drawing tools, let's use
them to make another picture that will become part of a more sophisticated
illustration. Before you're done, you will make use of Animator's rich sup
ply of f onts, the 3-D Emboss tool, the surprising Spark effect, and the Glass
method of overlaying images.
You already know how to use Poly, Box, and Line to make flat shapes,
so I now invite you to use them to make the black-and-white picture seen in
Figure 4. 7. W hen you have completed your drawing, use Box and Unzag ink
to remove jagged edges and then save the picture as HOME&CAR.GIF; we
will use it in the next tutorial.

BUILDING A TITLE

One of several tools we haven't mentioned yet is the Text tool. The fol
lowing example shows how to use this tool effectively. Bef ore opening the
60 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FOUR

Figure 4.7: HOME&CAR.GIF

text toolkit, reset Animator. Choose Opaque with a bright orange and use
Fill to flood the screen. T hen choose a pale blue ink.

1. Right-click on the Text icon in the Drawing Tools menu. T he result

ing menu panel has selections fo r creating, saving, and loading
text-none of which concern us now, because we're devoting
Chapter 7 to that topic. But look at the Font option; that's our key
to Animator's fonts. Click there and you will see a scrolling direc
tory of.fonts, as in Figure 4.8. For registered users of Animator,
Autodesk sends a bonus disk of additional fonts, so the number of
fonts possible in Animator is by no means limited. Choose a stencil
font from the Army series, preferably Army 24. Army is the best
choice for the "liquid" effect we're after.

2. Use the Text tool to draw a large box in the center of your screen,
and type the words

LIQUID
ASSETS

Be sure to include a space between each letter.

 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 61

Figure 4.8: The Fonts option on the Text menu panel provides a scrolling
directory of fonts.

NOTE
Lowercase is not available for this font. If you try to type in lower
case, boxes will appear, rather than characters.

If the words scroll upwards out of the box, bring them back in by
typing on your arrow-cursor keys. Then right-click to accept. You
should now have blue letters on an orange screen.

3. Still using Opaque ink, select Get from the Cel menu. Draw a tight
box around the text, and when you have the eel, use the Stretch
option of the Cel menu to stretch the image vertically and horizon
tally until it almost fills the screen, as shown in Figure 4.9. We will
use this image when we continue with the next topic-embossing
text.
62 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FOUR

Figure 4.9: Stretch the eel until it almost fills the screen.

USING THE INKING TOOLS

In traditional animation, the drawing of outlines for animated characters

and the painting of these outlines were handled by two different people. Ani
mator's Home menu panel reflects this division of labor. Many of the inking
tools are computerized versions of natural phenomena associated with the act
of brush painting, such as Pull, Smear, Soften, and Scrape. Others are entirely
new modes of automated painting that can't be accomplished with a single
stroke of a paintbrush; Bright, Close, Dark, Emboss, Glow, gradients of various
kinds, Hollow, Jumble, Spark, Split, Sweep, and T ile.
 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 63

EMBOSSING TEXT FOR A 3-D EFFECT

Emboss, which adds a 3-D "ledge" effect around edges of flat areas,
and Tile, which repeats a rectangular pattern across the screen, are good
examples of effects that are part of every artist's standard repertoire, but
these effects usually cannot be achieved without hours of painstaking effort
with a paintbrush. In one second, however, that same artist can use Anima
tor to emboss a screenful of text or tile the screen with multiple copies of the
most complex image.
So far, we've restricted our explorations to some rather pedestrian
drawing applications, but now, with the inking toolchest open before us
and all those silicon chips humming impatiently for something interesting to
do, we can put together a more appealing picture.

1. Make certain that the F button (Filled) is on. Use the Box tool and
Emboss ink (at 50 percent strength, the default value) to emboss
your text. Emboss usually works by adding a dark edge to the right
and bottom sides of a shape and a bright edge to the left and top
sides. In this case, because we chose highly saturated colors, you
won't see an effect, but edges have been added.

TIP
If Emboss doesn't appear on your Home menu panel, right-dick
on any ink and replace it by choosing Emboss from the scrolling
directory in the Ink Types panel.

2. I'd like to show you more clearly the effect of the Emboss ink with
out ruining the effect we're after. In order to do that, we will save
our work in the Swap screen. That way, we can experiment with
the present screen, making all the changes we want, safe in the
knowledge that we can recover with the Trade option. This is a
valuable trick that will greatly increase your productivity. Choose
Clip from the Swap menu to save a snapshot of the screen.

3. Apply Box and Emboss repeatedly to the image, and you may be
able to detect a subtle layering effect. To recover, choose Trade
from the Swap menu. This replaces the present picture with the
64 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FOUR

contents of the Swap buffer. Then, for good measure, choose Clip
again to over-write the experimental image with another copy of
the present image.

4. Apply Box and Spark ink to the image. It will undergo a radical
transformation. For one thing, the embossed edges will suddenly
become apparent. But more striking, the colors inside the box will
have been replaced by new colors, and at the diagonal boundaries,
multicolored patches will appear. To my mind, the total effect is
reminescent of glass, plastic, or even liquid. You can enhance the
effect by applying Emboss once again.

5. Using Fill and Opaque, flood the background with pale blue, includ
ing the open spaces within letters that don't properly fill. This com
pletes the essential title. If you like, you can continue to the next
step: adding a background gradient.

ADDING GRADIENTS FOR GLAMOR

You rarely see a title screen from an old black-and-white movie that
wasn't enhanced and glamorized with a smoothly shaded gradient of light
and dark values; often, the titles were shot against the glossy furrows of
draped satin. You can add further interest to the picture created above by
applying Animator's default black-and-white gradient. (We will introduce
color gradients in the next chapter.)

1. You should begin by selecting the cluster box containing the black
and-white gradient. T here are actually two default cluster boxes: a
black-and-white cluster box and a rainbow cluster box. If the cur
rent cluster box is the rainbow cluster, you must right-click on the
box to change it. Then, select the A button in the Palette menu
panel. We will discuss the Palette menu in more detail in the next
chapter.

2. The bright side of the gradient is on the right, but we want it on the
left. Choose Reverse from the Cluster menu. Return home by right
clicking on the drawing screen. Use Fill plus Hgrad ink to fill the
background. If the gaps in some of the letters don't fill, you can fill
them by hand using Fill plus Opaque. (Hgrad would fill them with a
miniature version of the whole gradient). The next topic exp lains
how to fill various spaces with the proper color.
 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 65

SELECTING COLOR FROM THE SCREEN

Frequently, you will find that you need to select a color directly from a
point on the screen; this is an example of such a situation. To put a screen
color in the Current Color slot, move the cursor to a point on the screen that
is the color you want and press F 1.
To fill the gaps in your letters with the proper shade of grey, pick up the
shade directly above or below each letter, and then use Opaque and Fill.
When you're finished, save the entire screen as a eel with the Clip
option on the Cel menu. In addition, you can save another copy as a GIF file.

COMBINING IMAGES WITH GLASS INK

To complete your tutorial on the basic drawing and inking tools, we
will now overlay the image of the house and car with the title "LIQUID
ASSET S.''
Load your HOME&CAR.GIF picture file. Select Glass ink, and set the
strength to 80 percent. Select Paste from the Cel menu. You will now see the
title screen pasted as a translucent overlay over the picture of the car and house,
as shown in Figure 4.10.
When overlaid by the rich-looking glass text, the image of the house
and car will no longer look crude. You should now have a presentation
graphic that you wouldn't be afraid to show a bank president.

SUMMARY

T he drawing of the Indian chief, though crude, took a little more per
serverance than most of our examples, but it did demonstrate a low-tech
way to transfer images from the external world into Animator, using a grid
for guidelines. T his is an artist's trick that has been around since the Italian
Renaissance.
The chief taught you one of the fundamentals of special effects for film
and video: the use of a key matte. You also learned about stretching, reposi
tioning, and flipping eels, a technique you will use practically every time
you use Animator to make stills or animations.
66 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FOUR

Figure 4.10: T he completed Liquid Assets title screen

Next, we covered blending, anti-aliasing, and dithering, techniques

that are as fundamental to computer graphics as the key matte method is to
video. These will help combat the annoying visual artifacts that can creep
into your images b ecause o f the restricted resol ution of the graphics screen.
When using them, however, you should be aware that there is always a price
to be paid in terms of lost contour clarity, color blurring, and in general,
reduced picture resolution. Sometimes it is worth the price, but you must
use it with discretion. You can make that judgment call yourself, and you
can always Undo the operation if you decide you don't like the result.
In this chapter, we covered two advanced inking tools, Spark and
Emboss. Spark can easily produce bad results, such as a multicolored bloom
ing effect that looks like a wildflower plot gone to seed, and it often over
whelms the original image with baroque excess. In this chapter, though,
you've seen how it can be used under controlled conditions to produce a
sparkl ing appearance.
 Mastering the Drawing and Inking Tools 67

TIP
W hat are these controlled conditions? Well, I have found that
Spark can be used effectively on large, extremely simple shapes
that contain few colors.

T he Emboss tool is one of the few tools in Animator that directly pro
duces 3-D effects. Using Emboss, we were able to throw our lettering into
relief. Emboss can do in an instant what an accomplished sign-painter would
need hours to do. I predict that this is a tool you will use again and again.
You also witnessed the power of a composite image formed by pasting
a eel over your background using Glass ink. As I pointed out, the visual
sophistication of this effect can easily compensate for a simple background,
and in f act, may work best in that setting.
You've combined Animator's simplest drawing and inking tools with
some of its most elegant, but you've by no means covered them all. T hat's
fine, because I have no intention of depriving you of the joy of discovering
the others on your own (you can rely on the Autodesk manuals to guide
you). In f act, we scarcely mentioned two of the most fruitful tools of all:
namely, the Bright and Dark inks. At low strength (roughly eight to twelve
percent), these inks are the easiest way to render highlights and shadows
that I've ever seen. In one of my first animation assignments, in fact, I used
Bright and Dark on a friendly pig. The curves and hollows of his fa ce practi
cally rendered themselves in seconds with the use of these inks.
In this chapter, we have borrowed from the accumulated knowledge
of artists from the time of Leonardo to the modern masters of high definition
television (yes, there are already masters of this new medium, and they use
the key matte technique). Yet, you've scarcely touched the Palette tools.
Animator's "color-crunching" sophistication has made possible the most
interesting visual effects you've seen so far. Are you ready to take control of
262,144 colors? If so, then turn to Chapter 5.
CHAPTER

FIVE

EXPLORING
A QUARTER
OF A MILLION
COLORS
 At the end of his long career, the great
physicist Isaac Newton modestly summed up his contributions to science by
saying, '' ...I have been like a small boy playing by the seashore, diverting
myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than
ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." At
this point, having not experimented much with Animator's color-handling
tools, you may feel a bit deprived, too. In this cha pter, you will learn how to
make color gradients (called ramps), and we will have our first crack at ani
mation, using the Color Cycling feature. T he animation you develop here
will simulate the classic Hollywood ending sequence of riding off into the
sunset.
To get started, initialize your screen with Reset and look at the multicol
ored stripe known as the cluster box in the middle of your Home menu panel;
think of it as the gateway to Animator's slumbering color-crunching powers.
Move your cursor to the cluster box and right-click. T he Palette menu panel
will appear, with a narrow menu selection bar across the top of the screen, as in
Figure 5.1.
I won't go into all the options of the four menus, since some are rather
specialized and all are described in your manual, but let's hit the highlights.

MANAGING YOUR PALETTE

In the Palette submenu, you can Restore a frame to eliminate all

changes made since opening that frame, you can modify the colors of Ani
mator's menus, you can choose a single palette for every frame in a flic, and
you can access the very useful Cycle Draw and Files options. Let's examine
some of these options, shown in Figure 5.2, in more detail.

DRAWING MULTICOL ORED

OBJECTS WITH CYCLE DRAW

When Cycl e Draw is active, certain tool s will use the range o f colors in
the cluster box instead of using the current color. To see this, reset Animator,
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 71

Figure 5 .1: The Palette menu panel and selection bar

select Cycle Draw, and select the B cluster box. Draw on the screen with the
Spraytool. The result is a stream of brilliant confetti. Then choose brush size
7 and the Gel tool. As you draw, Gel will dot the screen with translucent gels
of various colors that could easily be turned into balloons using the Jumble,
Bright, and Dark inks.

TIP
Here's a suggestion: try using these effects as the basis of an invita
tion to a party, sale, or celebration.

LOADING AND SAVING COLOR FILES

It should already be clear to you that color plays an enormous role in

the atmosphere of your messages. Santa Fe colors such as aqua, pink, and
72 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

Figure 5.2: The Palette submenu

yellow-orange establish a very different mood from Bauhaus colors such as

white, grey, black, red, and yellow, or classical colors such as gold, copper,
umber, and ochre. As you create color ramps, shade individual colors, and
arrange colors in your palette, these settings are stored along with the con
tent of your picture in the GIF file. The 256 color slots in your matrix are
accessed by number; thus, if colors are not kept in the right order, your pic
ture will be quite a wreck .
There are several reasons why you will sometimes want to pluck an
entire color gamut from one picture and use it to create harmonizing images .
The first is the esthetic requirement for consistency. As we will see in the
chapter on effective presentations, consistency in color can be much more
impressive than quantity of color. The second reason is that your VGA card
can become overwhelmed by the task of switching entire color palettes
from one frame to the next. This often causes small white dots or streaks in
your flic during playback, known as snow. Thus, you should try to keep
major upheavals in your palette to a minimum. One of the many ways to
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 73

minimize color-switching problems is to re-use an established palette file.

Animator allows you to save palettes independent of images by means of a
palette file, which uses the COL extension. The Files option of the Palette
menu , seen in Figure 5. 3, works just like the file management options of the
other menus we've already covered.

Figure 5.3: The Files option of the Palette menu

REMAPPING COLORS

Your Animator directory already contains one palette file, NTSC.COL,

which is designed to minimize color smearing and discoloration when con
verting a VGA image into a signal that can be recorded on a VCR. Develop a
test image and load NTSL.COL. When the new matrix appears, you will see
quite a few attractive color gradients for gold, copper, leaf-green, lavendar,
aqua , and so on.
When you load the new palette, the colors on your test image will go
awry, because slots 0 through 255 in your 256-Color Matrix now have new
74 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

color values. Even though both the default matrix and the new matrix might
contain some green colors, the colors occupy different locations in the two
matrixes. Fortunately, Animator solves the problem with a dialog box that asks:

Color Fit Screen?

Ordinarily, your answer will be Y for yes. This color fitting (or remapping)
technique allows Animator to find the closest match to any given color in
the current palette, although it will fail if you need green and the new pal
ette has no green at all. If that is the case and you want to cancel your choice,
do so with the Restore option of the Palette menu.

MANAGING CLUSTERS OF COLORS

Let's get comfortable with the Cluster menu, shown in Figure 5.4,
because it will be a crossroads for heavy traffic throughout the rest of this
book. Time and again, you will use the Cluster options to profoundly affect
the use of color in your next drawing or painting operation. Using Cluster
functions, you can allocate cluster slots for a new color gradient, reverse the
left-right direction of a color gradient, or extract the colors found along a
line in your image.
Keep in mind that a cluster is simply a representation of some portion
of the 256-Color Matrix. Color slots in the Matrix being used by the current
cluster box are highlighted.

NOTE
In practice, you can use a cluster box in two ways: as a broader
palette than the Mini-Palette from which to choose a current
color, or as a source of related colors to be applied automatically
by Cycle Draw and the various gradient inks. The advantage of a
cluster is that it allows you to maintain an extensive color gamut
from which you can shade objects manually or automatically.

GETTING A CLUSTER
The principle command is Get Cluster, which allows you to select the
beginning and ending from the 256 Color-Matrix slots. The prompt line for
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 75

Figure 5 .4: The Cluster menu

the Start color is shown in Figure 5.5; a similar prompt appears for the Stop
color. These colors, along with all those intervening, are loaded into the cur
rent cluster box. They can either be used as is or changed by a subsequent
operation, such as establishing a new color ramp .

REVERSING THE ORDER OF COLORS

Another important command is Reverse, which switches the left-right

ordering of the cluster colors (and the up-down ordering for an ink such as
Vgrad). This is particularly handy in shading objects with a light-dark color
gradient, where opposite sides need different directions. In this regard, the
Ping-Pong option does much the same thing automatically, but gives y ou less
latitude for control. Ping-Pong creates a symmetrical gradient (for instance,
light-dark-light).
76 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

Figure 5.5: .The prompt line for the Get Cluster command

CAPTURING
AND CHANGING IMAGE COLORS

Line Cluster is particularly noteworthy. It allows you to load the cur

rent cluster with the colors found along any line that you draw across your
image, as in Figure 5. 6. The Unused Colors option is useful for locating col
ors not being used in the picture; it is safe to load these into the cluster box
for editing. This protects you against loading your cluster box with values
already used on the screen and thus changing them unwittingly. A related
command is Invert, which replaces the contents of the current cluster box
with colors not used by the current cluster.

HANDLING RELATED COLORS

The Find Ramp command finds all of the colors in the 256-Color
Matrix that lie in the range of colors between your chosen start and end
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 77

Figure 5.6: Capturing colors with Line Cluster

colors. W hen you are using the default palette, this command usually pro
vides only a handful of colors. (Compare this with a similar command in the
Value menu called Ramp, which creates the colors that best match the given
ramp.)
Near Colors captures a range of colors related to the given color within
a specific numeric threshold . You will often find the best setting for a thresh
old to be a number between 10 and 20. For instance, for grey-green, a setting
of 15 collected nine greys, four greens, and one blue from Animator's
default Matrix. Using 20 collected all kinds of colors, while 10 collected
only one grey.

ARRANGING COLORS

If you're old enough, you may remember the color-by-number cult of the
1960s, when reproductions of such masterpieces as 1be Last Supper were
offered as do-it-yourself kits. Well, all kitsch aside, Animator has something in
78 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

common with that: it too colors by the number. The assignment is strictly arbi
trary, since you can toss electric-blue and apricot-yellow into any slots you
want to. This applies both to the Matrix itself and to your clusters (since a clus
ter is simply a portion of the Matrix). The Arrange menu allows you to sort col
ors in a cluster by Luminance, Spectrum, or Gradient schemes. This menu also
allows you to swap the contents of the A and B cluster boxes. The Cycle option
is the headquarters for color cycling animation.

SORTING BY LUMINAN CE,

SPECTRUM, AND GRADIENT

The brightness, or luminance, of a color, is equal to the sum of the

values of the red, blue, and green components of that color. In the simplest
possible terms, the more red, blue, and green light coming from a pixel, the
brighter that pixel will appear. In reality, there is a slight complication: a
given increase of green light causes more perceived brightness than the same
increase of blue. For reasons such as this, luminance sorting is not always
reliable. However, it works well to restore a color ramp that has been scram
bled, or on colors that are closely related in hue.
Both sorting by spectrum and sorting by gradient rely on the first color
in a cluster as the starting point, and they sort the rest of the colors by hue or
by luminance/saturation. The Spectrums option orders colors according to
spectral hue (you know, red, orange, yellow, and so on). However, colors
that are related in hue but not in luminance and saturation may be separated,
so you can have more than one rainbow in a cluster. The Gradients option
tries to establish more of a light-dark gradient, sometimes at the expense of
placing unrelated hues together.
To see these effects most vividly, fill your screen with V grad ink and
choose the All button, which selects the Matrix rather than the current clus
ter. Then choose the Luma Sort, Spectrums, and Gradients options of the
Arrange menu and compare the result.

ALTERING THE PAL ETTE VALUES

I have found the Ramp, Tint, and Negative commands to be the most
useful options in the Value menu. The Ramp command can make a color gra
dient that is as coarse as burlap or as smooth as satin . The Tint command can
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 79

be used to fade a flic gradually into any imaginable color. The Negative
option can throw an image into its photographic negative. We will use all of
these options in this chapter, but first, several others deserve mention.

SQUEEZING THE PALETTE

The Squeeze command provides a dialog box that specifies how many
colors may appear in the current picture, and can be used to eliminate
unused colors from the Palette. Obviously, if you reduce the number of
shades, you risk marring your picture, but you may be surprised to find how
tolerant pictures are to color reduction. It depends a great deal on the pic
ture. The model's face in PORTRAIT.GIF with its myriad flesh tone shadings
is more sensitive than others. On the other hand, the astronaut picture,
WALK.GIF, can go down to as few as sixteen colors without unpleasant
results.

CAP TURING COLORS FROM A CEL

The Cel command allows you to replace either the entire palette or the
current cluster with the colors in the current eel (depending on whether
you've highlighted the All or Cluster button).

RESTORING THE DEFAULT PALETTE

The Restore command lets you restore Animator's familiar default pal
ette (the one used in the DEFAULT.FLX file) with a click of the mouse.

CUTTING, PASTING,
AND BLENDING VALUES
The Cut, Paste, and Blend commands allow you to clip the colors in
the palette or cluster, save them in the color buffer, and then transfer them
back to the palette or cluster. The Blend option tints each color slot in your
cluster or 256-Color Matrix with the corresponding color slot in the color
buffer.
Now that I have described the color tools, let's try using them.
80 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

CREATING COLOR GRADIENTS

You can make coarsely dithered color ramps with either the Find Ramp
option on the Cluster menu or the Ramp option on the Value menu. If you
want elegant, smoothly shaded ramps of color, it's best to create them from
scratch with the Ramp option of the Value menu. First, here's an example of
a bold, Impressionistic sunset. We will be using both the A and B cluster
boxes. The A box will hold a spectrum of scarlet to black that will form a
haze around the sun , and the B box will hold a palette of scarlet to yellow for
the sun itself.

1. Go to the Palette menu panel and select the A cluster box by click
ing on the A button. From the Cluster menu, choose Get Cluster.
You will see a message bar across the top of the screen prompting
you for the Start color. For now, it doesn't matter much which
color in the 256-Color Matrix you choose; pick any one. The mes
sage bar tells you to pick another color as the Stop color; pick
another color box. The cluster box will then fill up with the colors
located between the Start and Stop colors in the 256-Color Matrix.

2. Choose the Find Ramp option on the Cluster menu. For the Start
color, choose scarlet, and for the Stop color, choose black. This
should load about six shades of red into the A cluster box.

3. Choose Circle and turn on Filled, then right-click on the Rgrad but
ton to reach its options box; highlight Dither and click on Center.
Move the cursor to the top of the screen and extend your radius
down to the center of the screen. This sets up a radial color gradi
ent in the top half of the screen, but you will not see it yet.

4. Using any ink c ol or from the Mini-Palette, click on the top center
with the Circle tool and Rgrad ink and extend the radius down to
the center of the screen again. That will create a circular halo for
our sunset-see Figure 5.7.

5. Now choose the Oval tool and V grad ink and hasten back to the
Palette menu for the next exercise.

You can access related colors more quickly by customizing both

cluster boxes. I will show you how to do that in this step, although
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 81

we could actually re-use the same cluster box for this simple
application.

6. Select the B button on the Palette menu panel. Choose the Find
Ramp option of the Cluster menu, and this time choose scarlet for
the Start color and yellow for the Stop color. This should load about
four shades into your cluster box. Return to the drawing screen and
move your cursor to the top one-third of the screen to make an
oval. You can set the oval's approximate height with a circle and
click to accept it. Then stretch the circle into an oval. W hen you
click, the shaded sun will be filled in over the lower part of the red
haze.But the bottomCO-top shading will be yellow to red, because I
deliberately had you choose your Start and Stop colors in the
wrong order. This allows me to show you how to reverse the ramp.

7. Undo the oval and return to the Palette menu. Select Reverse from
the Cluster menu, making sure that the Cluster button, not the All
button, is highlighted. The ordering of colors in the cluster box will
be reversed. Return to the drawing screen and make another oval;
this time, it will be shaded from red to yellow towards the top.

Figure 5. 7: The sunset haze

82 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

8. Using a filled black box and Opaque ink, erase part of the scarlet
base of the sun, as if it were cut off by the horizon, as in Figure 5.8.

9. To make a simple landscape, us e Line and Opaque. Go to the Palette

menu's 256-Color Matrix and choose the darkest red-brown you
can find. Draw a horizon line and the two lines that will frame the
vanishing roadway, as shown in Figure 5.8. Fill in this background
with Fill.

10. Finally, save your image as a eel by doing a Get from the Cel menu.
Since this is the background for an animation we are going to
develop, go to the Files menu and save it as SUNBKG.CEL.

TIP
Among the countless other interesting color combinations for gra
dients, check out lime-green with red-violet; brown or yellow
orange with blue; and lime-green with scarlet.

Figure 5.8: The sunset

 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 83

MIXING COLORS AND

CONTROLLING YOUR PALETTE

In this exercise, we will use a palette function that can change your
image instantly. Let's say that you found the black-and-white test pattern
developed in Chapter 4 too plain. If you tint it with a hint of purple, you will
find it not only more appealing, but also more suggestive of vintage
television.

TINTING A PICTURE
To tint your picture, do the following:

1. Load TEST2. GIF, the Indian Head test pattern you developed in
Chapter 4. Go to the Palette menu panel and turn off the Fit button.
As explained in the Animator Tutorial Manual, Fit allows you to
re-order colors in your 256-Color Matrix without inadvertantly
altering the colors in your picture. However, tint won't work if Fit
is on, and we don't need to worry about the best fit for new colors,
so turn Fit off . Also make sure that Time (T) is off.

2. Go to the Cluster menu and choose Line Cluster. This allows you to
capture screen colors (in this case, black, white, and a few greys) in
the cluster box. Click on the screen above the chief and draw a
diagonal line that captures all the greys you've used. They will
show up in the current cluster. Go to the Value menu and choose
Tint. A message line prompts you to choose a color. Choose a
medium purple.

3. A dialog box appears, containing a slider-control bar for the tint

strength, expressed as a percentage. For the sake of added color
interest, you may wish to use a value as high as 50 percent. When
you click, the picture will be tinted grey-violet. Try undoing the tint
and tinting with various strengths to see the effect. A less strongly
tinted screen may look more natural to you. Save your tinted pic
ture as TEST3.GIF.
84 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

MODIFYING
COLORS WITH SLIDER BARS

Animator's ability to switch between two completely different color

spaces with the click of a button is perhaps one of its most under
appreciated features. A color space is an ab straction of the three
dimensional space that we are all quite used to. In ordinary 3-D space, you
can move back and forth, up and down, and left and right. You will be able
to command your eels to move along these three axes of space in the chapter
on opticals.
In 3-D color space, by analogy, any one color can be described with
three dimensions: a red amount, a green amount, and a blue amount-in
other words, the old faithful RGB of television. Those of you who've
worked with traditional artists' pigments will be familiar with a second kind
of 3-D space for color: to make any color (in principle, not in actual prac
tice), you could simply mix a certain amount of magenta, a certain amount
of cyan, and a certain amount of yellow. Animator does not currently sup
port a model for cyan/magenta/yellow, which would be nice for doing
color separations prior to printing. What it does support is an even more
natural and convenient color model called HLS, which stands for Hue,
Luminance, and Saturation.
The term hue refers to the spectral position of the color, whether it's in
the red, orange, yellow, or some other family. Animator models the spec
trum on a color wheel divided into 255 hues . Some representative hues are
as follows:

HUE ID NUMBER

Red 0

Orange 21

Yellow 42

Green 85

Cyan 1 28

Blue 170

Violet 191

Magenta 235
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 85

A color's luminance is roughly equivalent to its perceived brightness. On

this scale, which runs from 0 to 255, sky-blue rates higher than ultramarine.
A color's saturation is a measure of its color density. A saturation of
zero means that the color appears as some shade of white, grey, or black. A
saturation of 255 means that the color is very strong, unmixed with any
black or white. A saturation of 255 leads to unnaturally brillian.t colors,
except when the luminance is very low (or put less precisely, the color is
very dark).
If you've never worked with HLS before , you're in for a real treat; in
fact, I seldom use RGB at all . We're not going to use HLS to control the colors
in our next picture, though, because this is a rare case where RGB is much
more appropriate.
You've just made a 1960s-style black-and-white test pattern, and now
we're going to make today's broadcast test pattern, which consists of pure
RGB bars and their cyan/magenta/yellow (CMY) complements.

TIP
This test pattern m ight prove useful to you in adjusting the
chroma signal from a VGA-to-video encoder when recording your
animations on a VCR.

The RGB and HLS color controls take the form of slider bars in the Pal
ette menu panel, as shown in Figure 5.9.

Figure 5.9: The RGB and HLS Slider Bars

86 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

USING THE RGB SLIDER BARS

Before beginning this tutorial, I suggest that you restore all major set
tings with Flic/Reset. We're about the divide the screen into six vertical bars.

1. After choosing the Box tool and Opaque ink, go to the Extra menu
and choose Grid. Now create a grid by moving to the upper-left
corner of the screen and clicking; then slide the cursor to the right,
watching the coordinates in the display bar at the top of the screen.
The first two coordinates will be zero and zero. Watch the second
pair of coordinates, which appear in parentheses. Click when they
reach 53 and 199. The screen will then be divided horizontally into
six bars. Choose Use from the Grid Snap menu. Note that when the
Use option is activated, it's marked with an asterisk. Return to the
drawing screen.

2. It is now time to create the pure RGB and CMY colors. Go to the
Palette menu panel and click on the first color slot in the Mini
Palette. Make sure the RGB button is on. Then click on the RGB
sliders and select the values shown in Table 5.1. Make the Key
Color slot black.

3. This step should be fun. Using Box and Opaque, with Grid active,
select yellow from your Mini-Palette and click the cursor on the
upper-left comer of the screen, then drag it towards the bottom of
the screen. The outline of the color bar appears as if by magic;

Table 5.1: RGB Values for Pure Colors.

RED GREEN BLUE COLOR

63 63 0 Yellow
0 63 0 Green
0 63 63 Cyan
63 0 63 Magenta

63 0 0 Red
0 0 63 Blue

63 63 63 W hite
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 87

click, and it will be filled with yellow. Repeat this action from left
to right with green, cyan, magenta, red, and blue. Go to the Grid
Snap Control menu and turn off Use. Finally, save your color test
pattern as BARS.GIP.

A NIMATING WITH A COLOR CYCLE

Color cycling is one of Animator's five types of animation, and the first
we will tackle in this book. We are going to make the simple but effective
animation mentioned previously, a "riding off into the sunset" flic. You cre
ated the background for it at the beginning of this chapter, when you made
the shaded sun in SUNBKG.CEL.

CREATING A RAMP FOR COLOR CYCLING

The first step in color cycling is to get a cluster of colors suitable for the
cycle. If you're happy with the default cluster, that step is taken care of,
otherwise, you will have to fill the cluster box with your own colors. In this
exercise, we're going to use a very coarse and limited ramp composed of
exactly four colors. Begin, as usual, by resetting Animator.

1. Using the Line tool, Opaque ink, and some color from the Mini
Palette, draw five horizontal lines in the middle of the screen, and
then draw pairs of converging lines for the shoulders of the road
and its centerline, as in Figure 5.10. Be sure that all segments
formed by these lines are closed, because we want neither the
shoulder of the road nor its centerline to be filled by the Fill action
in the next step.

TIP
You can often close a broken line by applying Close ink.

2. Using Fill and Opaque, fill the screen with the current color, so that
only the shoulder and centerline segments remain. If you flood a
segment, choose Undo and repair the hole in that segment, then try
88 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

Figure 5 .10: Create a road converging on the horizon.

again. The key color should now be the same as the current color.
Save the image as ROADl.GIF.

3. Our color cycling animation is designed to work with exactly four

colors, which we will generate with the ramp function. Go to the
Palette menu panel and choose Cluster, then Find Ramp. For the
Start color, choose a pale blue from the center of the 256-Color
Matrix. For the Stop color, choose a dark charcoal-grey from the
bottom row of the matrix. You should wind up with a ramp of four
shades in your cluster box. If not, repeat this step with some other
choice of pale blue and dark grey until you have exactly four colors
in your cluster box.

TIP
If you have any trouble generating this ramp, you can get any four
slots into your cluster and manually adjust their colors to the values
needed. From left to right, the four colors should have the fol lowing
HLS values: (170,198,238); (170,156,122); (170,132,49); and
(170,84,73).
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 89

4. Fill in the shoulder and centerline segments with the f our shades in
a cyclic fashion. Start at the nearest segment of the left shoulder and
begin with the pale blue, then use the darker blue for the next seg
ment.Run through all four colors and start over again if you have
more than four segments.At the right shoulder, begin with the sec
ond palest blue and render the segments different shades as before.
At the centerline, begin with the third shade.

5. If your background is not black, select black and fill the entire back
ground with it. That sets the scene.The colors will jump from seg
ment to segment when the animation plays, giving the illusion of
bright patches slipping under your wheels. Let us now proceed to
animate.

MAKING FRAMES AND ACTIVATING TIME

Animation is a phenomenon that relies on a rapid succession of still

images calledframes. Just as you can't shoot a movie until you've loaded
film into the camera, you can't make an Animator flic until you've loaded in
the frames.
In several menu panels, including the Home and the Palette panels,
you will see a Time (T) Button. W hen this button is highlighted, it means
that any change you make to a frame can be applied, at your discretion, to all
the frames in your flic or to any chosen segment of the flic. We will need this
button on, since we want to apply the color cycling to our entire animation.
Click on it now.
Next we will generate the frames.Examine the Flic Control icons at the
bottom of the Home menu panel. In the middle of them is a grey box that
should contain the number 1. This is the ID number for the frame currently
on display. It is also your gateway to the Frames menu panel, shown in Fig
ure 5 .11. Either click or right-click on it, and you will be whisked away to
Animator's "film lab."

1. We will discuss the parts of this menu panel in detail in Part II, but
for now, f ocus on the upper-right corner of the panel. You will see
a box containing the number 1 next to the Insert button. That box
90 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

Figure 5.11: The Frames menu panel

shows the total number of frames currently available. Click on it. A

dialog box with a slider bar appears, prompting:

How many frames do you want in this flic?

The answer is 32. Click on the slider and drag it until it reads 3 2,
then click on OK.

2. The Frames menu returns, and the number 1 has been replaced by
the number 32. The Time Select button is highlighted. Right-click
on the screen to banish this menu, and you will return to the Home
menu. Right-click on the cluster box and go to the Palette menu
panel. From the Arrange menu, choose Cycle.

3. The Time Select menu panel appears. The highlighted buttons are
Complete and To All, which we want active. Two of the most
important buttons on this panel are Preview, which allows you to
preview the flic without creating an actual flic in memory, and Ren
der, which makes an actual flic. Choose Preview to see what the flic
will look like. The segments will cycle through their colors .
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 91

4. Now Render the flic, and when all 32 frames have been calculated, the
Palette menu panel will return. Exit the Palette menu and play the file
with the > > button as many times as you like.You may find it odd
that the roadway seems to be going away from you, not towards you,
as expected. This may be due to the ordering of colors we've chosen ,
but it's of no consequence. Let's fix that now. Right-click on the draw
ing screen to return Home, and choose the Backwards option of the
Flic menu.

5. The Save Flic Backwards? menu panel appears, prompting you for a
directory name and a filename. If you've set up a Flies directory, use
that.Name your flic ROAD.FU and save it.The flic will play back
wards once, and you will be returned to Home. Select New from
the Flic menu to erase the original version and load ROAD.FU back
into memory. Play your flic. If all is well, it should look great. Stop
the flic with a right-click or a keypress and go to the Home menu.

SUPERIMPOSING IMAGES IN A FLIC

We can make this flic much more interesting if we provide it with a proper
background. Don't forget the sunset you made and saved as SUNBKG.CEL ear
lier in this chapter. Let's paste it into all the frames of your new flic.

1. Your T button should be on. Load SUNBKG.CEL, using the Files

option of the Cel menu.The eel will appear briefly within a mar
quee and then disappear. Right-click to make the Files menu panel
disappear.

2. Now, using the Paste option of the Cel menu, paste the eel without
moving it by immediately right-clicking when it appears.The eel
will reappear just above, perhaps partially overlapping the road.
The Time Select menu panel returns, with Complete and To All
highlighted-again, this is just what we want. Click on Render, and
when all the frames are pasted, play your animation. Save your
animation as SUNSET.FU.
92 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

MAKING SMOOTH
COLOR GRADIENTS

I had originally planned to end this chapter at this point, but as a bonus
for the diligent student, I've come up with my own alternative to Animator's
normal color cycling that I hope you will find intriguing. To demonstrate it,
I will throw in some tips concerning smooth color gradients. T his method
also provides a demonstration of the Negative palette tool.
As I mentioned before, smooth color gradients are created using the
Ramp option of the Value menu. Here's how.

1. Reset the program, and choose New from the Flic menu to create a
new flic. Using the Get Cluster command in your Cluster menu,
allocate 64 color slots for your gradient-the equivalent of two
whole rows in the Matrix (and, incidentally, one-fourth of your
entire palette). Sixty-four seems to be a good size for a cluster that
must support a smooth color gradient; it provides plenty of inter
mediate color steps either for a light-dark transition of one hue, or,
as will be the case for us, a gradient between two hues. Choose
Ramp from the Value menu. You will be prompted for a Start color,
and the Current Color slot will flicker with the colors as your
mouse passes over them. Click on white. Then you will be
prompted for the Stop color. Choose violet. Animator will churn
for a moment, and then the current cluster box will contain a gradi
ent that goes smoothly from white from violet. That's all you need
to know about making smooth color ramps.

2. Choose a golden brown from the middle of your Matrix as the current
color; we will use it for some text. Return to the drawing screen and
choose V grad ink. Using brush size 1, make an unfilled box in the left
hand one-third of the screen, as in Figure 5.12. The box is elegantly
shaded from white at the top to violet at the bottom.

3. Click on Opaque ink. Right-click on the Text button, and you will
see its options box, which will be discussed in full in Chapter 7. For
now, simply click on the Fonts option, and you will see a scrolling
directory. Double-click on Early14, and Animator will load the
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 93

Early14 font. Click on the drawing screen, and draw a text box in
the lower half of the screen but outside of the Vgrad box. Then type
in Electrifying.

4. Now allocate the frames. Right-click on the grey Frame ID box, and
this will take you to the Frames menu. Right-click on Insert, and
insert 56 frames. Go to the last frame by dragging the frame slider
bar to 57. Right-click on the drawing screen until the Home menu
reappears. The Frame ID box reads 57.

5. Now draw the lightning bolt: selecting Draw, pick up white from
your cluster box, and move your cursor inside the Vgrad box. Draw
a slightly ragged diagonal line from the upper-right of the Vgrad
box to the left-hand side. Give your lightning bolt one vertical
branch. Choose Fill and Lgrad and fill the spaces inside the Vgrad
box. You will get a splendid result that captures the aura of energy
around a lightning bolt.

6. Go to the Frames menu again and insert three frames. Click on the
..... icon to move to frame 58. Go to the Palette menu and turn off
Fit. Verify that Cluster is selected. From the Value menu, choose

Figure 5.12: The lightning flic

94 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER FIVE

Negative. This causes the image of the lightning to become black

and green. Click on the-+ icon in the Palette menu again, twice, to
move to frame 60, and choose Negative again. Now play the flic.

This gives you a fabulous animation, but you can add an extra visual
kick with the Negative tool if you like. Read on.

MAKING NEGATIVE IMAGES

I frequently use the Negative tool on one frame in a flic to generate an.
explosive optical effect. I have found that it works better than simply insert
ing a frame composed of some arbitrary solid color, probably because the
computer can convert all the palette values to their negatives much more
quickly than it can repaint the entire screen with one color. I'm assuming
here that you've just completed the lightning flic developed above. Here's
how to give it a final flash.
In the Frames menu, go to frame 60 and insert five frames. Move to frame
61 and render it negative (this restores the white/violet gradient). Go to frames
62 and 63 and clear them to black. Don't alter frame 64. Move to frame 65 and
click on All. This allows your changes to affect the entire 256-Color Matrix.
Choose Negative, and wham!-the screen goes white and the text turns blue.
The lightning in this frame is purple and white. Now play the flic again, and you
can practically hear the crack of the thunder.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, you've discovered the real key to Animator's visual

richness: the depth and subtlety of its colors . Now you can make spectacular
textures for objects and backgrounds.
We started with a tour of the Palette, Cluster, Arrange, and Value
menus. You've used Cycle Draw for multicolored images, and you've stud
ied the NTSC.COL color file. You've defined your own clusters, and have
 Exploring a Quarter of a Million Colors 95

created smoothly and coarsely shaded color ramps.We covered the marvel
ous effects that can result from the Tint and Negative color tools , and I intro
duced you to the Hue/Luminance/Saturation color space. As far as I'm
concerned, you might as well click on the HLS button and leave it on perma
nently, because I don't expect that you will want to go back to the rather
artificial RGB way of specifying color.
You've also had a brush with animation in the form of color cycling,
and you have even mastered some essential Hollywood trickery, such as
superimposure of images (the sun over the road). But we didn't slow down
to explain the whats and whys of time and frames. That's coming up in the
next chapter. We even went beyond standard color cycling with a custom
ized alternative, using negative images for a startling effect.
All in all, you haven't yet encountered much that couldn't be found in
a modern high-end paint program costing about ten times as much as Anima
tor. But of course, this is no mere paint program-this is Animator. Let us
now travel into another dimension entirely, a dimension not only of depth
and perspective, but one of rhythm, duration, and evolution. Submitted for
your approval: a f ourth dimension ... the dimension of time.
PRODUCING
ANIMATIONS
CHAPTER

SIX

BRINGING
IT TO LIFE
 I n Part I, we experimented with Ani
mator much as we would with any paint program, and a lot of what we did was
fairly straightforward. But now you've entered the twilight zone between old
fashioned still-life rendering and live-action video. You may experience a few
moments of disorientation, particularly once you try optical effects in the chap
ter on opticals, but nothing as extreme as the feelings of actor Robert Hoskins in
the recent movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when he drove into Toon Town,
a cartoon universe where the laws of physics and common sense did not apply.
Yes, the Animator Trace and Frames menus can be a little strange. How
many of us know the meaning of the terms "unblue," "Venetian," and "flip
five?" I thought you might appreciate a less technical, more historical intro
duction to Animator's way of doing animation. After all, precious few com
puter owners have ever ventured into an animation studio where these
terms might be overheard.
In this book's introduction, I saw no need to explicitly identify Mickey
Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice in Fantasia or Wile E. Coyote as the self
:!escribed inventor-genius in the Roadrunner series. I was confident that
you would recognize these allusions, because you belong to a generation
that was practically raised on eel animation. After seeing Peter Pan, a whole
nation of children dreamed of flying, and practically everyone has seen Bugs
Bunny outwit Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd.
Given this history, you can understand the appeal of animation, but you
probably never expected to assemble your own animation studio. Loading Ani
mator onto your hard disk changes all that; by doing so, you bring in a whole
studio of creative talent. If you're not already convinced of this, let's examine
the nature of the animator's art as it was practiced between the years 1910 and
1989 B.A. (Before Animator), to find out what kind of resources it demanded.

UNDERSTANDING ANIMATION

Film scholar T homas Hoffer, in Animation: A Reference Guide, has

actually traced the hist ory of animation to the ancients. For instance: "70
B.C.: Lucretius in De Rerum Natura described an apparatus that projected
 Bringing It to Life 101

hand-drawn moving images on a screen," and "A.D. 900: While the origins
of the Chinese shadow show are obscure, some date the use of silhouetted
objects in the eleventh century. The shadow show used brightly painted
paper-thin figures which glowed through a screen or glass." But for now,
we're interested in eel-based film animation, because we want to under
stand Animator's use of eels, frames, and opticals.

NOTE
To cover a professional animator's requirements, we would need
to explore all of Animator's options, but some of the more special
ized tools are beyond the scope of this book. One goal of this book
is to help you decide which parts of Animator not to worry about
as you get great results with the essentials.

Most authorities trace the dawn of eel animation to the times (if not
always the person) of Winsor Mccay, whose early animated film Gertie the
Dinosaur is still well-loved. Mccay, following the only models he knew
(live-action film and the earlier handpainted zoetrope toys), drew the whole
scene anew on each "page" of his animation. In other words, he redrew
both the static background and the moving characters in the foreground.
Soon, however, John Bray, (who, like McCay, supported his animation habit
with a day job as a newspaper cartoonist), devised a way to reduce anima
tion to a more manageable, though still tedious job. He painted the charac
ters on clear panes of celluloid ("eels") that overlaid the static background,
which meant no more unnecessary redrawing. Thus the word eel on your
screen has a history of over 70 years.
An animated feature begins with intensive planning. The story is the
main concern, and it gets mapped out on a storyboard. Then a script is writ
ten. The first actual production phase takes place, not in an animation stu
dio, but on a sound stage. The producer records a soundtrack and finalizes
all the major audio cues to the action. Professional animators usually rely on
the soundtrack to provide timing for the action, not vice versa. Next, pre
cise time measurements are taken of music, sound effects, and dialogue.
These measurements are then transferred to bar sheets, which are quite sim
ilar to symphonic scores. They serve as the common reference for all spoken
phrases, mouth movements, stage directions, music, camera pans and
zooms, and background cues. Finally, the director goes over the bar sheets
with the animators. It is not until this stage that any real animation work can
begin.
102 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SIX

The first pass of animation is done on translucent paper, not on eels.

The animators do not render every drawing required for continuous
motion. They make only the extremes-the beginning and end points of
crucial movements. The host of intervening (in between, or tween) draw
ings is produced by assistant animators and "tweeners ." Now you see where
some of these terms arose.
The preliminary animation is checked by simply flipping through the
pages. You've surely seen examples of similar flipbook animations. If the work
passes this test, the pencil renderings are photographed and checked again in
the projection room, in what is known as apencil test. To save time and money,
the film negative is usually projected, resulting in delicate white figures flicker
ing across a dark screen. If any corrections are required, they too go through
pencil tests, until everything looks satisfactory. Good results are important in
this step, since any significant errors that survive into the eel-production stage
can run up serious costs in time, money, and frustration.
At this point, the approved drawings are either traced by an inker onto
celluloid or acetate eels or photocopied onto the eels by a special machine. The
eels are painted with opaque paint, but this is not as straightforward as it
sounds. It is common to split up a character into several parts, based on the fre
quency of movement. The hands, eyes, and mouth, if they move the most,
might go on the top eel; the face and head on another; the arms and legs on yet
another; and the body, which moves the least, might be on the bottom-most
(least accessible) eel. The maximum allowable depth for eels is about five. Cels
are not perfectly clear, and the more eels you stack, the duller the paint
becomes. To compensate, painters keep on hand a battery of shades for each
color on the character. The eel nearest the top is painted with the dullest shade,
and the lowest eel is painted with the brightest. If this isn't done properly, the
result is an irritating flicker of color.
When the eels are ready, they are layered over the background with
precise registration and photographed. This process is repeated for each set,
until all eels have been photographed. The color film is processed by a labo
ratory that also adds the soundtrack, the many channels of which have been
mixed down to the two channels of stereo. If the print is perfect, the pro
duction is over, and the feature is released to the world.
The staff for this production therefore includes: a producer, a director,
an assistant director, writers, a storyboard artist, a character designer, a lay
out artist, an animator, assistant animators, tweeners, an animation planner,
a background artist, an inker or photocopy operator, a checker, a camera
operator, and a film editor. If it wasn't abundantly clear to you before why
you couldn't simply ask a few colleagues to help you knock together a short
 Bringing It to Life 103

animated film for your next training session, this ought to explain it very
plainly. The time, expense, and talent requirements necessary to produce
traditional eel animation for film are simply enormous.
But the desktop video revolution has changed all that. Look over the
list again. If I had the room to provide job descriptions here , they would
indicate a lot of low-paid, noncreative staffers doing the difficult, mundane
dirtywork associated with film in general and painted-eel animation in par
ticular. The video part of desktop video frees you from the expense and has
sle of film processing, and the desktop computer, thanks to Animator, can
handle the precise but mindless tasks of tweening and painting.
In the last chapter, we walked through the essentials of animation
without explanation. You might have been curious to find out how to get the
results we were looking for, but if we had dropped our introduction to ani
mation at that point, you would have had to figure out how to generate
frames and work with the Time Select menu before using titles, opticals, or
any other type of animation.
Therefore, we're going to take a second look at the use of frames and
Time Select functions, with an easy and satisfying tweening project: a flic
that shows one of our talented assistants (we will call her "Liz") as seen
through an expanding iris. We will conquer the concepts as we come to
them in the course of creating a bona fide animation.

GENERATING FRAMES
FOR YOUR PRODUCTION

The first phase of animation is to prepare Animator itself. The follow

ing steps illustrate how you will generally start the production day in your
studio, once you've assembled your cast (eels) and scenery (pies).
Initialize Animator by choosing the Reset option of the Flic menu. This
provides us with a common starting point in terms of drawing and inking
tools, colors, and so on . Then choose the New option. This removes the
default flic loaded in by the Reset operation.
Since this animation involves a revealing look at Liz, we need to have
her on the set. Load her as a GIF file from your Pie menu . The model's pic
ture is stored as PORTRAIT.GIF. Once you've loaded her in, use the Clip
option of the Swap menu to save her to the Swap buffer. Then clear the
screen to black with the Clear option of the Pie menu.
104 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SIX

Now you can request Animator to allocate the necessary number of

empty frames-in other words, the segments of memory that contain the
delta records. Animator uses the delta information to transform one frame
into the next. Our requests are handled by the Frames menu panel; to call it
up, right-dick on the Flic Control icons at the bottom of the Home menu
panel (the boxed number or the forward/play/reverse buttons). You should
see the panel shown in Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1: The Frames menu panel

The Frames panel is a command center for practically anything that

moves through an Animator flic, whether it deals with color cycling, titling,
eel animation, tweening, or optical effects. You will use the Frames menu
panel whenever you want to:

Create frames for a new flic

Insert or delete frames

Adjust the playback rate by duplicating every frame two-, three-, or

five-fold

Define a segment of your flic as the only part to be affected by the

next Time Select operation (pasting a eel, color cycling, etc.)

Mark a segment in the animation for quick access during your work
(you might think of this as a video bookmark)

For the sake of convenience, the Frames menu panel also duplicates
functions performed in other Animator menus: the Current Frame button,
the Flic Control icons, and the play-speed slider bar. Finally, the Time Select
button links you to its menu panel, as you will soon see.
To generate the frames for this flic, use the Total Frames box, the small
box beside the Insert icon. T his box allows you to create new frames, add
 Bringing It to Life 105

frames to an existing flic, or shorten a flic. T he maximum number of frames

is 4000. At a rate of 40 frames-per-minute, this works out to a 100-minute
flic. I frequently generate animation files consisting of between 100 and 200
frames, which take up over half a megabyte of RAM (or disk space).
If the number you enter in the Total Frames box is greater than the cur
rent value, the image in the last frame will be duplicated to make up the dif
ference. If the number is less than current total, Animator will warn you that
it needs to discard the excess frames and ask for permission. Answer N f or
no if you don't want to lose that footage; this will cancel the deletion.
Otherwise, answer Y fo r yes.
So far I haven't mentioned the buttons marked F, S, and A. T hese but
tons determine whether your next action applies to the current frame, the
current segment, or all of the flic. We will begin by working with operations
that affect the whole flic, so for now, make sure that the A button is
highlighted.
By the way, the number box below the Delete icon is analogous to the
Total Frames box; this one, however, indicates the number of frames in the cur
rent segment. We will not be using it for this flic.
Now you are ready to load the frames. Click in the Total Frames box.
You will see the dialog box shown in Figure 6.2 .

.
.... ...
.

Figure 6.2: The dialog box for adjusting frames

106 MASTERING ANIMATOR

CHAPTER SIX

The heavy cursor in the entry box indicates that Animator is awaiting
your entry. Type in 3 2 or you can click on the slider bar and drag it until the
number 32 appears inside. Then click on the OK button. Now that you've
loaded the film, settle back in your director's chair for a lesson on tweening.

USING THE TWEENING

TOOL FOR ANIMATION

Let's review what we've done so far. We've cleared out any resident
flic and made a new one with 32 frames (so far, they're all empty). Our
model Liz is still cooling her heels in the Swap buffer, having been loaded in
at an early stage. Now we're going to create a sequence in which a photogra
pher's iris opens to reveal our model peering back at us. To do that, we will
employ the tweening tool.
As mentioned previously, tweening refers to the generation of a series
of intermediate shapes between a start and an end shape (which can occupy
different locations on the screen). W hen enough of these shapes are dis
played in rapid succession, there is the illusion of a smoothly evolving shape
(which is the meaning of the fancy term polymorphism).
Like virtually every other feature of Animator graphics, tweening
relies on mathematical calculations to get the job done. A tweenable shape is
what is commonly called a vector shape. It is stored and manipulated as a
series of points, and Animator connects these points with line segments
(vectors) when it transfers them to the screen. The points are moved to their
new positions in each successive frame, and the lines are redrawn. As a final
step, closed shapes can also be filled in as solids. The lines can be straight, as
in the case of Poly, Rpoly, and Star, or they can be curved, as in Oval, Petal,
Spiral, and Spline. These shapes are all tweenable; Circle and Box are not.
Use tweening whenever you want to:

Change one type of object into another type

Move a tweenable shape across the screen

Change a shape composed of straight sides into one composed of

curves
 Bringing It to Life 107

Adjust the boundary of a closed shape to provide sprouting parts or

indentations

Create the illusion of shapes turning inside out

One disadvantage of using the tweening tool to make solid shapes is

that it does not, by itself, provide interesting textures, and can result in
rather flat and boring shapes when used with an ink such as Opaque. In this
example, you will see one solution for that: the use of tweening together
with an advanced inking function such as Scrape.
It's possible to generate a tweening sequence in which a star turns into
a triangle, but not vice versa. You cannot create a tween that results in more
points than originally specified. However, you can still generate such a flic
by tweening. For example, you can tween a star into a triangle and then save
the flic with the Backwards option of the Flic menu.
You can access the tween operation by choosing the Tween option of
the Poly or Spline drawing tools. It does not matter which of the tweenable
shapes you are working with: Poly, Spline, Oval, Spiral, or any of the others.
Now let's make a tweening animation.

1. Using Scrape ink, choose the Rpoly drawing tool to generate a regu
lar polygon. The default shape is a hexagon, which is exactly what
we want. The Filled option should be on and the 2-Color option
off. Click on the center of the screen and drag to create a small hex
agon. Before clicking to freeze it, rotate it clockwise by about five
sixths of a turn. The small iris in the black screen will reveal the
center of Liz's face. Now clear the screen.

2. Select Poly, and choose the Tween option. You will see the Tween
ing Options menu shown in Figure 6.3. Select the Set Start Position
option. The hexagon will be surrounded by highlighted points. To
accept that shape, right-click, otherwise, you can try changing the
shape with the following sequence: click near one of the points,
move the cursor to a new position and click again. The point on
your tweenable shape will then move to that new position. If you
want to try this, go ahead. Right-click to cancel this change when
you're done; then right-click again to accept the original hexagon
and return to the drawing screen.

3. Starting at the center, make a large hexagon that extends to the edge
of the screen, rotating it counter-clockwise about five-sixths of a
108 MASTERING ANIMATOR

CHAPTER SIX

turn (we want to make this rotation in the opposite direction from
the first rotation, simply to add additional spin). The final Scrape
hexagon will reveal most of the photograph. Clear the screen and
select Poly. Choose Tween and select Set End Position. Then select
Do Tween. The Time Select panel will appear, as in Figure 6.4. Let's
take a quick time-out from the tutorial while we take a closer look
at it. We will continue with the tutorial in the section called Pacing
by Frame Edits.

.
..... ...
.

Figure 6.3: The Tweening Options menu

Figure 6.4: The Time Select panel

 Bringing It to Life 109

UND ERSTANDING
THE TIME S ELECT FUNCTIONS

The Time Select panel could just as well be marked Director's Menu. Its
three main choices are action buttons marked Preview, Render, and Cancel,
which let you preview the result of your latest operation, render an actual
flic, or cancel the time-related function.
The Preview option displays the application of ink over time so that
you can check out the effect. It runs considerably slower than the actual flic,
but it does no permanent harm to an existing flic if you change your mind
about adding tweening to your current animation. You can cancel a preview
by holding down the right mouse button and then clicking on the left but
ton. This will return you to the Time Select panel and restore the flic to its
original state.
The Render option creates the actual flic. It, too, can be cancelled by
holding down the right mouse button.
The Cancel option ends the use of the Time Select functions and
returns you to the previous menu; you can also right-click on the drawing
screen to cancel.
In addition to these action buttons, there are buttons marked To
Frame, To Segment, and To All that determine whether the operation will
affect a frame, a segment, or the entire flic. They are mutually exclusive and
the F, S, and A buttons indicate your choice. The central six buttons are for
choreography: Still, Ping-Pong, Reverse, In Slow, Out Slow, and Complete.
They supply high-level direction over the nature of the motion.

PACING BY CHOREOGRAPHY

In the language of dance , a single word is enough to make an entire

troop of ballerinas perform a complex movement in perfect synchrony. The
same is true with Animator: your magic words appear like amulets on the
Time Select panel-Still, Ping-Pong, In Slow, and so on. These buttons give
you general control over the pacing of motion as it unfolds over time.
The Still option is intended to allow you to verify the placement of a
still image from the beginning to the end of an existing animation. The still
image is always the last image produced by the current time-dependent tool.
You would ordinarily use this option only with Preview or a scratch copy of
your flic.
110 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SIX

The Ping-Pong option distributes the forward motion of the animation

over the first half of the allotted frames, and then builds the reverse motion
in the second half. Since the forward motion is now applied to only half the
frames, it will play twice as fast. If this is undesirable, allot twice the usual
number of frames before using this option. (The easiest way to double the
allotment is to select the * 2 button on the Frames menu, which duplicates
each frame.)
Th Reverse option renders the flic as the reverse of your current oper
ation; this operation is ignored if Ping-Pong is turned on.
The In Slow option produces motion that begins more slowly than
normal, while the Out Slow option produces motion that appears to slow
down near the end of segment or flic. If you select both In Slow and Out
Slow, you can produce a highly effective movement for objects that shrink
in size. They will gradually build up speed and then appear to dwindle as
they shrink in the distance.
The Complete option is usually left on, ensuring that the current oper
ation is applied to all frames in the selected segment or flic. However, for a
cyclic flic, it is desirable to have the motion incomplete. If the motion were
complete, then there would be two copies of the final position-one at the
end and one at the beginning-and these back-to-back copies would result
in a slight pause. Therefore, you may wish to turn off Complete for cyclic
flies to ensure that the last frame falls just one frame short of the complete
cycle.
To summarize our findings, the Time Select panel allows you to choose
both what kind of movement is to be applied and its duration (that is, over a
frame, a segment, or the entire flic).

PACING BY FRAME EDITS

Another way to control the pacing of the action is by altering the num
ber of frames in the flic or a segment of the flic. You can do this in the Frames
menu, as shown in Figure 6. 1. ( You will learn how to define a segment in the
chapter on optical effects.) You can reproduce frames in two ways: addition
or multiplication. Using the addition ( +) button, you can duplicate the cur
rent image for a specific number of frames. In the Frames menu, this is done
with the Insert button. Click on it, and a dialog box appears that allows you
to insert up to 100 copies of the current frame (the frame that appears in the
Frame ID box). To insert more than 100 copies, simply use the Insert func
tion again. By inserting copies of the current frame, you can make the image
pause during playback.
 Bringing It to Life 111

T here are also three buttons marked *2, *3, and *5. As in BASIC pro
gramming, the asterisk is a symbol for multiplication. W hen you click on
these buttons, each frame is given one, two, or four copies. The copying
process can apply to a frame, a segment, or all of the frames, depending on
which of the F, S, A buttons is highlighted. T he multiplication process causes
the flic to run more slowly. You can increase the playback rate with the
playback-speed slider bar. Multiplying frames does not make a flic run more
smoothly, though, since it maintains the same relative proportion of transi
tion times from one position to the next. Something that appears jerky in
twenty frames will often appear equally jerky in forty frames.
. . .And now, back to our regularly scheduled tutorial. Returning to our
tweening exercise, you should still be in the T ime Select menu. To create the
animation, choose In Slow: this lends a more natural pace to the unfolding
of our iris. T he Complete and To All buttons should be highlighted; note also
that Scrape appears in the current ink button. Select Preview and watch the
iris expand. T hen select Render. At this point, you can play the flic from
almost any of Animator's major menus. Save your flic as IRIS.FU; you can
use it later in your demo presentation.
Here's another suggestion: starting with Reset, follow all the instruc
tions above, except this time, turn off Complete and select Ping-Pong. You
will now see the iris both expand and contract. This is a visual motif that you
can use for changing scenes, the classic "iris-in/iris-out" of silent movie
days.

EDITING SEGMENTS OF YOUR FLIC

We're not done with the IRIS.FU flic yet. As with our lightning flic of
Chapter 5, I have just the kicker to complete its visual appeal: a photogra
pher's flash, which can be added to the end of the sequence. IRIS.FU cur
rently has 32 frames, but the Frames panel makes it easy to add more.

1. Use the.+ icon to jump to the last frame, and go to the Frames menu.
Right-click on Insert. Animator asks:

Insert how many frames?

Enter 8. This brings the total number of frames to 40. Play the flic
and note the pause at the end, where eight static images have been
added.

2. Now we will define a short segment in which Liz will display a very
negative outlook. First click on Time Select to highlight it. This will
112 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SIX

WARNING
It's easy to delete frames in Animator, but in my experience, this
occasionally destroys a perfectly good segment. If you want to
remove frames from your flic, please save a working copy of the
flic first!

allow you to apply your palette change over a selected range of

frames. Click on the S button to specify that the duration is for a
segment. Adjust the start and end values for the segment by clicking
on the arrows on the start and end boxes. Modify the start and end
positions for your segment until the start box on the left reads 39
and the end box on the right reads 40. Then assign those values to
Segment A by right-clicking on the A segment button.

3. You can also mark the start of this segment with video's answer to
the bookmark. You will find that such marks are convenient in both
short and long flies. To place the mark, drag the currentframe
slider - the slider at the top of the menu panel-until it reads 39.
Then right-click on the A mark button. Play the flic and use your
spacebar to stop it at random. Then click on the A mark button, and
you're back at frame 39.

4. Go to the Palette menu and turn off Fit. Click on the All button (to
ensure that all colors, not just the current cluster, are affected). This
is absolutely necessary if you want to radically alter the coloration
of a flic. From the Value menu, choose Negative. The Time Select
menu panel appears. Choose Render and then play the flic. When
the iris opens fully, the image will flare as a brilliant negative, simu
lating a flashbulb. Save this flic as FLASH.FU.

At this point, I can't imagine a reader who wou ldn't exclaim, "This is
really neat!" This is precisely what Autodesk is referring to with their slo
gan, "It'll really move you."

TRANSFORMING SHAPES

Stric tly speaking, the photography animation w e just develo ped is not an
example of polymorphism, since the beginning and ending shapes are both
 Bringing It to Life 1 13

hexagons. Now let's do an actual shape transformation, because it is a popular

way of expressing ideas in animation. There is a good reason for this: graphi
cally illustrating one object being transformed into another is a very effective
way of demonstrating the associative recall and logic that form the basis of all
human understanding. In this example, we will transform a telephone into a
sheet of paper, illustrating the idea of facsimile transmission.

NOTE
Humans are metaphorical animals. Each thing we encounter is
always subject to comparison and contrast with related objects,
and such relationships are mirrored in polymorphic tweening.

1. Reset Animator and create a blue gradient using one of your existing
cluster boxes. Enter the Palette panel and select the Ramp command
of the Value menu. For your start color, choose a blue-green, and for
your end color, choose periwinkle. Exit to the drawing screen and
choose brush size 5. Using the default font called System, and any
Opaque blue ink, create the title

Receive your contract via fax

at the top of the screen.

Using the Get and Stretch commands, capture this title as a eel and
stretch it until it extends across the width of the screen. Clear the
screen after the Get command, or a duplicate of the fax message
will remain after the Stretch operation. Using blue ink and Draw,
add a dot to each /, and use black ink to make holes inside each E
and A character. This will significantly improve legibility. Using
Emboss ink at 100-percent strength and a filled Box tool, emboss
the title.

2. Go to the Frames menu by right-clicking on the Flic Control icons

at the bottom of the Home menu panel. Insert fifteen frames and
return to the drawing screen (that is, remain at frame 1). In the left
side of the screen, using blue Opaque ink and the Poly tool
(unfilled), draw the outline of the telephone shown in Figure 6.5.
Return to the Frames menu and insert a duplicate frame, then go to
that frame (frame 2). We want our tweening to start here, rather
than on frame 1, because we want the option of graphically altering
frame 1.
114 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SIX

WARNING
You should realize that after you create an animation, it is risky to
alter individual frames manually; this sometimes "breaks" the
flic. If this happens, Animator reports, "file corrupted," and that's
all, folks! Use Animator's tools in conjunction with Time Select to
make changes to frames. Avoid doing it manually.

Figure 6.5: A tweening animation about faxes

3. Select Tween from the Poly options menu and choose Set Start Posi
tion on the Tweening Options menu. T he outline of the telephone
will appear. Right-click until you return to the drawing screen. On
the right half of the screen , draw an unfilled box with the propor
tions of a sheet of paper, then undo it (we don't want this ''page'' to
appear on frame 2). As usual , however, this undone shape is still
retained for the purposes of tweening. Return to the Tween menu
and choose Set End Position. T he outline of the "page" will appear.
Right-click , and you will see the Tweening Options menu again.
Select Do Tween.

4. The Time Select menu appears. The Complete and To All buttons
should be highlighted. Select Preview to see the effect, then Render
 Bringing It to Life 115

to actually do the tween; play the flic to see the result. Go to frame
1 and fill the phone with Vgrad ink. Use black Opaque ink (brush
size 5) and the Circle tool to make a rotary dial on the phone. The
Clear Key (K) button must be off. Insert 30 copies of this stationary
frame to let the audience get used to the phone before it tweens. Go
to the last frame and fill the fax page with Vgrad ink. Then insert 30
frames there, too, to pause at the final image. This completes the
flic. Save your flic as FAX.FU.

SUMMARY

This chapter has put Autodesk Animator into historical perspective,

explaining how it can produce the kinds of effects that ordinarily require a
large staff at a traditional eel animation studio.
Your first tweening project used Scrape ink to make an expanding hole
in a black screen that revealed our model, as if from behind a camera's iris.
You used the Negative command to bring visual punch to the flic.
You also made a polymorphic tween that transformed a telephone into
a fax page; it was simple, but it taught you all you really need to know about
tweening. Animator's tweening tool is by no means perfect. For instance, if
you try to tween ovals using the 1Ween options of the Spline tool, your end
ing shape will look more like a D than an oval. But this reflects a general
problem with Spline tweening-it often truncates part of a shape with a
straight line. With practice, however, you will soon learn when it can and
cannot be used.
This chapter was a crucial one for the animation student, because it
explained how to generate, insert, and delete frames, and it described the
significance of the FIS/ A (frame, segment, all) buttons in the Time Select
menu. This kind of housekeeping goes on behind the scenes and doesn't get
the same glory that beautiful animations do, but it is at the heart of any ani
mation project.
This chapter was fun to develop, and I hope it's been a good introduc
tion to animation. There's still a lot to learn, but you're halfway to your
goal. Titles, opticals, and eel animation are yet to come. You might say
we've only scraped the surface...
CHAPTER

SEVEN

GENERATING
TITLES
A ND CREDITS


TI
 I can't predict all the things that you
will do with Animator, but one thing is certain: your productions will require
some sort of text, titles, credits, or labels. Animator provides a wealth of
resources for this, including

A generous package of widely varied font types

A built-in text editor for creating, editing, and saving text

The ability to place text anywhere on the screen

Right- and left-justification options, as well as centering

The extraordinary effects produced by the inking tools

Scrolling in a variety of modes

262, 144 color choices

Since text and titling is such a big part of Animator, this is going to be a
big chapter. So, find a comfortable chair and settle back-you're in for some
surprises here.

GETTING ACQUAINTED
WITH ANIMATOR FONTS

You will find a number of additional fonts on the bonus disk. Some rep
resentative fonts are shown in Figure 7.1.
The fonts shown in Figure 7 . 1 are only a few of many. In most cases,
the largest font size available is pictured, because the larger the font, the bet
ter its appearance. Appendix C contains a complete list of the fonts on the
bonus disk, as well as a description of the fonts available from Entropy
Engineering .
 Generating Titles and Credits 119

Figure 7 .1: Representative fonts

USING TEXT EFFECTIVELY

We could get straight to the nitty-gritty of putting text and titles on

your screen, but having seen a few ineffective Animator presentations at a
recent convention for architectural, engineering, and construction software
applications, I am tempted to yell "Cut!" at this point and offer a session on
good communications poli c ies We can save the larger issues of judgment
.

and planning for the upcoming chapter on effective presentations, but

before we look at the "how" of on-screen text, let's tackle a few "what"
considerations. To be specific: what has almost a hundred years of filmmak
ing taught us about the use of the printed word in movies?
120 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

In the past, nobody was liable to confuse a newspaper with a movie.

After the silent movie era, it was clear that one was intended to be read and
the other to be viewed . Today, however, one of the perils of the multimedia
revolution is a misunderstanding about the practical differences between
print and video. You don't mind reading the thousands of words in this book
because they are effectively "for your eyes only." Close and crisp, they are
rendered in high black-and-white contrast in one of the highest-resolution
forms of all mass-market media: the printed page. One advantage of this
medium is its interactivity, to use a modern buzzword; you decide when to
turn the page and where to begin reading. Video and film may hold their
own glamorous roles in modern communications, but for the above reasons
and others I cannot describe here, the power of the printed page will remain
undiminished into the 21st century.

KEEPING TEXT SIMPLE

A live or taped presentation is obviously nothing like a printed page.
When using flipcharts , overheads, slides, or video, text approaches the sta
tus of a special graphic element . Text is special because it is subject to many
more restrictions than ordinary graphics; the added concerns arise from the
need for legibility, which is above and beyond any considerations of con
tent. Such concerns include:

Are the letters large enough to be read easily?

Are the light/dark and color-contrast values sufficient?

Is the font itself well-suited for character recognition?

Is there optimal spacing between letters, between words, and

between lines of text?

Do text and graphics work in harmony?

Is the text content simple enough for quick comprehension?

Is there a limited number of compatible fonts? Desktop publishers

know that mixing more than two or three fonts usually leads to
poor results.

Since your VGA card and the animation software place few limitations
on your ability to freely mix text and graphics, the urge to cram too much
 Generating Titles and Credits 121

text onto a slide is strong. But I encourage you to keep your text:

Short

Sweet

Simple

What does' 'sweet'' mean in this context? Simply that words should be
chosen for their power to reinforce the core, not the details, of your mes
sage. As for the appearance of the text itself, only a few of Animator's fonts
give professional results. Avoid those with a crude "computerish" or ama
teurish look about them. By extension, you should always use the largest
. font size you can. For static titles, you can increase color contrast with a tiny
embossed edge. This contrasting edge improves visibility. You will find this
technique frequently used on the cover of your favorite magazines.

JUSTIFYING TEXT

Justification is another important legibility concern. justification

refers to the alignment of text with the margins, and there are several possi
bilities. Text can be aligned only along the left margin, which is known as
of all things-left justification. In left justification, the lines are unaligned at
the right margin and are said to be ragged right. This leads to a somewhat
informal look.
Right justification with a ragged left is much less common, but is an
excellent choice for labelling the vertical axis of a chart or for the callout
labels that point to the parts of a diagram. It is w holl y inappropriate for text
blocks, though, because the eye can't find its way along a ragged-left
margin.
Centering is an option available for titles.
In this book, the text is justified (aligned) with both the left and right mar
gins. This was done by a combination of careful hyphenation and a sophisti
cated adjustment of the spacing between words, causing the text to fill the line
perfectly. In Animator, the analogous choice is known as the Fill Line option .
Inappropriate use of fill-line justification is one of the commonest mistakes of
amateur desktop publishers, often leading to excessive hyphenation and unsat
isfactory unevenness between words, especially in narrow columns. The result
is both clumsy in appearance and hard to read. Ergonomic studies indicate, in
fact, that the ragged right margin, while slightly informal, provides important
122 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

visual hooks for the eye to navigate through stretches of text. Therefore, you
will frequently see ragged-right margins in technical documentation. As far as
this book is concerned, Fill Line is not an option: the extraordinary ratio of
character size to column size in Animator renders it hopelessly impractical.
Keep in mind the following legibility concerns:

Again, the fill line option, which justifies both the left and right
margins, looks amateurish and is hard to read. My advice is to never
use this option. Text that is left-justified should be your usual
choice, but right-justified text can be used for special applications,
especially labelling charts. Centering is the obvious choice for
screen titles, but is unacceptable for blocks of text.

Avoid extensive use of all-uppercase text; reserve this for titles.

Lowercase is generally more legible, especially when used in a
proper-case setting (with leading words in sentences and proper
names receiving an initial capital letter).

It is hard to go wrong with Animator's most elegant fonts, Early and

Post. These are modeled after the highly readable "serif" category
of typefaces, such as the typeface used in this book. They are
shown in Figure 7.2.

The Block font, modeled after the "transitional" typefaces such as

Lubalin, is less formal than Early and Post but is also attractive and
quite legible.

Of Animator's "sans-serif' fonts, the Supbol series is highly recom

mended for its power and its clean look. Velvet and its virtual twin
Eiger are knock-offs of Helvetica that suffer from jaggedness, but the
largest members of the Velvet family improve somewhat when the
Unzag tool is used.

Other "novelty" fonts should be used only when they contribute to

the atmosphere of the piece. Deco and its cousin Windy are not
nearly as attractive as Giant for an Art-Deco look. Frilly and Scifi
are too cutesy for any business presentation. Ripple is a handsome
script font whose usefulness is stunted by jaggedness, but Quill and
Script are informal script fonts that should work fine for many
applications. Army is a strong, fairly clean stencil font that has
many uses. Edge may win you over to its artistic potential. The Map
font is a collection of map style icons, such as running deer, mi li tary
-
 Generating Titles and Credits 123

symbols, and people, as well as others that are bizarre and occasion
ally unrecognizable. You will be amused to see what happens when
you type on your keyboard after loading this font.

Did you recognize all of these fonts? Some of them are not included in
the Animator package itself, but are released in the bonus package. If you're
a registered user, Autodesk has probably already sent you these bonus disks.
Clearly, Animator's font list is subject to extension as Autodesk or third par
ties (such as Entropy Engineering) release more font packages.
Now, about kerning. Kerning is an adjustment of the spacing between
letters, and Animator doesn't always handle this properly. If you type ''Rip
ple" using the Ripple font, for instance, the two p's will be a bit too close,
and if you type ''West'' using the West font, thew and e will be too far apart.
There is no way to change the spacing between letters using the keyboard,
but if you are concerned about the appearance of your text, and kerning in

Figure 7 .2: The Early and Post fonts

124 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

particular, here are some suggestions:

Whenever possible, work out your text copy on a blank screen or

on the screen provided by the Edit option (found in both the Text
and T itling menus). This will allow you to cut and paste text freely,
using a deaf key matte. T he clear key method works best when the
background is composed of only the key color.

If you are having spacing problems, work with your text one word
at a time, using the Get option of the Cel menu to cut and paste the
characters. You can also create a grid or place horizontal lines
across the screen to guide you when aligning characters vertically.

Remember that once you begin applying inks to a screen composed

of text and graphics, it will be hard to make changes to the text.
Save your work often to a disk buffer, such as the Swap or Cel
buffer, to give yourself the option of undoing operations.

Don't be concerned about kerning for scrolling text and titles. You
can't change the kerning in such situations , and you really don't
have to: spacing errors aren't noticeable in moving text.

ENS URING CONSISTENCY

Consistency is one of the great virtues of the professional communica

tor. Steps taken for the sake of consistency are among your best safeguards
against confusing the audience. Here's a checklist for consistency in using
printed characters:

Have I established a consistent color scheme for my text?

Have I limited my use of fonts to two or three?

Is the placement of the text consistent from frame to frame , so that

the audience can expect to continue reading in a certain way?

I hope this advice helps you to use text effectively, but remember, these
rules are just guidelines. T hey can be broken, as long as you know and
understand them before you flaunt them.
Having gotten the "what" issues out of the way, let's now turn to the
"how" questions of text and titles.
 Generating Titles and Credits 125

WRITING ON THE SCREEN

Before you begin, reset Animator and make sure your current ink is a
bright Opaque color. You probably recall using the Text tool from our exper
iments in Chapter 4. Let's pick it up again by right-clicking on the Text icon
in the Drawing Tools panel. T he menu panel shown in Figure 7. 3 appears.

Figure 7.3: T he Text tool menu

As you can see, the Text tool contains one option for choosing the font,
and four options for handling blocks of text, called Reuse, Edit, Load, and
Save.

CHANGING FONTS
The default font is System, and its name will appear in the large display
box on the right side of the menu panel. We want to use Early14, though. To
change the font, click on the Font icon. The Select A Font panel appears,
with the fonts listed in a scrolling directory display on the left-hand side, as
shown in Figure 7. 4. The layout of this menu p anel is quite similar to other
126 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

file-management menus that you've encountered, so you should be per

fectly at home. Load Earlyl 4 by clicking on the t button (if necessary) to
scroll through the directory until it appears and then either double-clicking
on EARLY14. FNT or clicking once on EARLY14. FNT and then on OK. Alter
nately, you can type in the name EARLY14 and press Return. The font's
name will be submitted for your approval in the display box, shown in its
own face.

Figure 7.4: The Select A Font panel, with its scrolling directory of fonts

Let me pause for a moment to explain a mysterious button found on

several file management menus, including the Font Selection menu, that
we've glossed over so far.

GLANCING AT MACROS

To the left of the OK button in the Select A Font panel is a button

marked with a plus sign ( + ). This button is used in an Animator macro to
load the next file in a series of numbered files . What's a macro? A macro is
just a record of your keyboard and mouse input during a session with Ani
mator. By running the macro, you can make Animator repeat a sequence of
drawing, inking, flic control, and file management operations at any time.
 Generating Titles and Credits 127

(However, the tools, images, fonts, and colors to which it applies these oper
ations may vary from session to session.)
Here's a for-instance. You could create a macro to load in a text file and
font and display the text on the screen. This macro could use the plus-button
method to get two more text files and two more fonts, thereby adding titles
and emphasis to a block of text.

NOTE
You will have to copy the desired font files to files with new
names, such as DOZEOI.FNT, DOZE02.FNT, and DOZE03.FNT
for a presentation on bulldozers. To ensure that the macro runs
properly, type DOZEO 1.FNT in the File box when loading the
initial file and then use the plus button to load subsequent files.

As you can see from this example , macros aren't difficult to use, but for
most of us they are a solution looking for a problem. To justify the time it
takes to plan and implement them, you need to have an application that
demands a lot of repetitive operations. The Animator Reference Manual
contains two excellent examples of macros. The first uses a macro to draw
the same object multiple times with a brush of varying size, which can be
used to create a neon sign effect. The second uses a macro to apply increas
ing levels of the Pixellate effect to an image, thereby creating a flic. These
two examples suggest that a macro can provide a good way to create a
simple flic by varying the application of a special effect over time.
The moment of glory for macros will probably come when people
begin to generate animations of 3-D objects using various CAD or modeling
programs outside of Animator. If such an animation is stored as a lon g series
of numbered GIF files, Animator can be put into macro mode and left run
ning unattended while rendering them into a flic.

TIP
I encourage you to explore the subject of macros on your own.
Start by trying out the simple and impressive examples in your ref
erence manual.

Now back to our regularly scheduled tutorial.

128 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

WORKING WITH FONTS

T he best way to explore the fonts is to try them out on the whole
alphabet, both upper- and lowercase. T his is particularly helpful for the
Symbol and Map fonts , since they are comprised entirely of icons, making it
hard to remember which keys generate which symbols. T he Reuse option of
the Text menu allows you to switch fonts on the same text easily.
Let's try some simple experiments with the Text tools.

I. If you've followed the discussion so far, you will have loaded the
Early! 4 font. Right-click on the drawing screen and draw a Text
box over the whole screen. Toggle your Caps Lock key and type the
uppercase alphabet, then release Caps Lock and type the lowercase
alphabet. If you change your mind about the font or the text, you
can end the session by using the Backspace key to erase all text in
the box, then right-clicking. But for now, instead of backspacing
over the text, right-click to accept the text on the screen. After
viewing the text, use Undo to erase the text from the screen, or you
will see a duplicate of it in the next step.

2. Right-click on the Text tool and choose another font. Select the
Reuse option, and you will see the same text in the new font. Con
tinue this process with all fonts that look interesting to you.

3. Choose the Edit option of the Text menu. T his places the text box
against a blank background, and the text changes color. You can
resize the box by clicking on the screen, and you can edit the text
from the keyboard. You may want to add other characters to your
text now: for instance, the numbers 0-9 and their shifted counter
parts, brackets, and so on. Save your text as KEYBD.TXT using
the Save option of the Font Selection menu.

USING THE INKING TOOLS FOR TEXT

In Chapter 4, you learned how to combine Animator's inking tools

with its Text tool to create handsome lettering. T he following project fur
ther demonstrates the combined power of Animator's fonts, palette, and
inking tools; in particular, the Edge font, the Ramp palette function, and the
Lgrad ink, which we haven't yet mentioned. In this project, we will build a
 Generating Titles and Credits 129

logo for General Picture. The success of this image, like many in this book,
depends on attention to detail, so I will provide complete details.
Begin by resetting Animator. From the Font Selection menu, choose
Edge26 (available on the Animator bonus disks). Using Opaque yellow-green
ink and the Text tool, write the words

GENERAL

PICTURE

in the top half of your screen, beginning your text block (x, y) coordinates at
roughly (30,40). Then draw an unfilled box around these words, as shown
in Figure 7.5.

Figure 7 .5: A logo for General Picture

Now create a color ramp, using the tools in the Palette menu panel. The
first step is to click on the HLS button, so that you can use Hue/Luminance/
Saturation sliders to set the beginning and ending colors. Right-click on one of
the default colors in your Mini-Palette, and it will be highlighted with a red
130 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

frame. Adjust the sliders to the following settings:

Hue: 74

Luminance: 108

Saturation: 113

Click to accept these values, then right-click on another box, adjusting it to

these settings:

Hue: 85

Luminance: 36

Saturation: 170

T hese two colors will be the beginning and ending points of your color
ramp. From the Cluster menu, choose Get Cluster and fill the cluster with
the contents of two entire rows in the 256-Color Matrix. As you will recall
from Chapter 5, this is done by clicking on the first box of the first row and
the last box in the second row. T hen choose Ramp from the Value menu. For
your starting color, choose the pale green you just created, and for the end
ing color, choose the dark one. Return to the Home menu and choose Fill
and Lgrad Ink. Fill the box, and the result is the curious and wonderful effect
that resembles beams of light falling on deeply embossed lettering shown in
Figure 7.6.
Now you have mastered the essentials of working with text in various
fonts. I cannot stress too much how important these skills are in designing a
powerful presentation, since text will be an important part of any stationary
images you display. If your needs were limited to static text on static back
grounds, though, you could turn to a number of other business presentation
programs. What you are going to do next is to combine text with move
ment, which is Animator's forte.

DIRECTING SCROLLING
TEXT FROM THE TITLING MENU

Before we make a flic wit h scrolling text, you may want to get
acquainted with the Titling menu. To reach the Titling functions, choose the
 Generating Titles and Credits 131

Figure 7 .6: T he completed logo

Animator menu from the main menu selection bar and select the T itling
option. You will see the menu panel shown in Figure 7. 7.
T his menu panel allows you to manage text in much the same way that
the Text tool menu does, the chief difference being that in Titling you can
not save the text to a disk file of your choice. So if you're working on a para
graph's worth of text, use the Text tool instead of the T itling tool to create
and save it.

TIP
Question: What if you're working on more than one paragraph of
text? Answer: In all likelihood, you should be printing it on paper
as a handout, not subjecting a live audience to it in the visual
presentation.
132 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

Figure 7. 7: The Titling menu panel

Here is a short description of your text-management options:

OPTION SIGNIFICANCE

Do Titling Leads to the Time Select menu panel for previewing

and rendering the flic

New Text Allows you to define a new text box and enter new
text-any text in the temporary buffer is over-written

Edit Text Allows you to re-use text in the temporary text

buffer (analagous to the Text tool's Reuse option)
the background is always blanked out, and the text
appears in a color different from the current color

Load Text Allows you to load text saved with the Text tool

Place Window The text color remains the current color and the
background is visible-useful for repositioning and
resizing the window or editing the text

Load Font Allows you to change the current typeface

TIP
You can transfer the contents of the text buffer to the current
frame without going through the T ime Select panel by choosing
the Reuse option in the Text menu panel.
 Generating Titles and Credits 133

DESIGNING SCROLLING TEXT

There are two general categories of options called Movement and

Scrolling, but they are both concerned with defining the scrolling style.
Let's look at the various options without regard to their ordering on the
menu. First of all, there's Still, which uses no scrolling at all; it simply pastes
the text to a given frame , segment, or to the entire flic, depending on your
setting in the Time Select panel. The result is similar to that of the Text tool,
but provides more options for justification.
The Type On option allows you to place the text on the screen charac
ter by character, making it appear as if behind a moving typewriter head.
(You do remember the typewriter, don't you? It held a reign of drudgery
sometime after clay tablets and before VGA graphics.) If you can't add sus
pense into a segment any other way, you can at least make the audience
guess what your completed message is going to be by using Type On. The
direction in which the characters move as new characters are inserted
depends on whether you've set justification as Left, Right, Center, or Fill, as
explained in the Animator Reference Manual.
The other scrolling options are Scroll Up and Scroll Across. The Scroll
Across option pulls in a line of text from right to left, like those popular mes
sage marquees composed of hundreds of tiny lightbulbs. Finally, the Scroll
Up option imitates the classic Hollywood style of scrolling where the text
disappears into the top of the screen; it's hard to beat this for general
purpose use.
Your choices aren't exhausted yet. You still have to decide whether you
want to use smooth scrolling, where the increment is pixel-by-pixel, or the
jerkier character-by-character scrolling. Your natural inclination might be to
choose the more professional look of smooth scrolling, but for long credits, this
may require many hundreds of frames and more disk space than you have avail
able. The alternatives are to use less text, to reduce the scrolling text by using
some still text, or scroll character-by-character. My recommendation is to avoid
character-by-character scrolling unless you want to emphasize its jerky, unnatu
ral appearance as part of the atmosphere of the piece. Of course, if you're using
Type On , you've already made that choice, and the pixel-by-pixel scrolling
option is ignored when you choose this style.
Finally, there is an option called Frame Count. This is something you
should use every time you create scrolling text. It calculates how many frames
need to be in your file to get the smoothest scrolling, based on your choice of
scrolling style. After choosing Frame Count, you should adjust the number of
134 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

frames in your flic, by hook or crook, until it agrees with the number given in
Frame Count. Otherwise, you risk unsightly glitches in the movement of text
on the screen.
To sum up, the default choice for scrolling is: Scroll Up, By Pixel, Left (left
justified). Consider this the premium choice, and only change it if you have a
specific effect in mind.

MASTERING SCROLLING TEXT

In the following exercise, we will prepare a flic of scrolling text. You

can join this flic to the''sunset'' flic you developed in Chap ter 5. Today's flic
will be developed as follows: it will begin without text, the text will appear
frozen on the screen, and then it will scroll off the screen.

NOTE
The following exercise requires plenty of hard-disk space and
about an hour's worth of rendering time!

1. T he first step is to create the new flic, composed of a static image

over which the text can scroll. From the Flic menu, choose New,
and f rom the Pie menu, load the ROAD. GIF you created earlier
(composed of the road and the sunset). For color, choose a brilliant
scarlet from the 256-Color Matrix, and for your inking tool, choose
Glass at 80 percent. Move to the Frames panel, and insert 30 frames
by right-clicking on the Insert button and specifying 30 f rames.
Then drag the frame slider bar until it brings you to the 30th frame.

2. From the T itling Panel, load the Early IO font. Choose the New Text
option, and when the position cursor appears, create a box with
substantial top and bottom margins and narrow side margins, as in
Figure 7.8. Now type in the following message:

As our hero drives off into the sunset, we at General Picture bid
you farewell. Just remember that somewhere late into the night,
we'll be at work on another production for your viewing pleasure.

3. Right-click to accept, and you will return to the T itling menu.

Choose Frame Count, and a dialog box will appear to inform you
how many frames you need in order to run this flic smoothly. The
 Generating Titles and Credits 135

number will probably be about 200. Exit the Titling function and go
to the Frames menu. Insert the required number of frames; for
instance, to insert 200 frames, insert 100 frames (the maximum for
a single insertion request) twice. Define a segment of the flic for the
scrolling operation as follows: turn on the S (segment) button.
Adjust the segment slider bar so that the start number is 32 and the
end number is 232 (or whatever number brings you to the end of
your flic and satisifes the Frame Count requirement). Right-click on
the B segment button to highlight it.

4. To render the scrolling, return to the Titling menu and choose Do

Titling. The Time Select panel will appear, with the To Segment ahd
Complete buttons highlighted. The inking tool icon will read Glass,
and the Clear Key button (K) must be highlighted. Use glass at 90-
percent strength. Select Render, and this will create the scrolling flic.
When the rendering is completed, play the flic to view it in real time.

Figure 7 .8: A text box for your scrolling text

136 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER SEVEN

5. Add a middle portion to the flic where the text remains stationary, to
give the audience time to read the text before it begins scrolling. Go to
the first frame of the scrolling segment (frame 30, 32, or whatever)
and insert 30 frames. Now play the flic again, and save it as BYE.FU.

SUMMARY

Now that you understand how titling works in an actual example, you
will be better able to see what's involved in putting together a working presen
tation. Consider how the work you've done up to this point is building continu
ously towards our goal of a "demo reel" composed of several short flies. For
instance, you began this flic by creating a picture called ROAD.GIF. You used
simple Line and Fill tools to create the shapes. You used some of Animator's
most powerful palette tools to colorize it with color gradients known as ramps.
You created a background eel containing a sunset, much as a traditional eel ani
mator would, and combined it with the road in the foreground.
You replicated this still image as a flic, and then added some appropriate
text over it, with a satisfying sense of timing. T he flic begins, the text appears,
and then it starts scrolling. You can join this titling flic to the flic of the speeding
road to get some impressive results. After that, the ROADBY E flic will become
part of a bigger presentation. This process is a good example of precisely how
you will produce your own movies.
In this chapter, you've gotten acquainted with Animator's large library
of fonts, and we've had a serious look at using them to your best advantage.
You now know how to create and edit text, how to use it in conjuction with
stunning special effects, such as Lgrad, and how to direct a scrolling flic.
This means you're ready for the most challenging part of Animator: its
digital-optical effects. And that, needless to say, is the subject of our next
chapter.
CHAPTER

EIGHT

INCORPORATING
OPTICALS
 In this chapter, we will tackle features
that present some of the greatest challenges to the animator, whether novice
or experienced: optical effects. Optical animations usually involve a two
dimensional element such as a eel or a polygon that appears to be tumbling,
spinning, and careening through simulated three-dimensional space. These
sorts of images were originally developed for film , using photographic
double-exposures, and were therefore called "optical" tricks. With the
advent of video, computer graphics were harnessed to give the same result,
and the terminology of film simply carried over. The most popular sources
of digital optical effects have been products from Ampex's Digital Optical
division, known to the video trade as ADO. Autodesk Animator brings you
much of the power of these digital optical techniques at a small fraction of
the cost. The optical tools are found in the Optics panel shown in Figure 8.1,
which you reach by selecting the Optics option of the Animator menu.

Figure 8.1: The Optics panel

 Incorporating Opticals 141

CHOOSING A N ELEMENT

You know that the Optics tools can zoom objects, but might not know
which objects. This is governed by the Element menu of the Optics panel,
shown in Figure 8.2. The most popular candidate for optical effects is proba
bly the eel. Using the Optics functions to flip, twirl, and glide an object can
instantly produce an animation that a traditional eel-animation studio
would need weeks to complete. In order to use this tool on a eel, you must
first ca pture a eel from the screen or load it from disk.

Figure 8.2: The Element menu

Another candidate for optical effects is the flic. Using Animator to pro
duce a full-featured flic, and then tumbling and gliding that flic using Optics, is
perhaps the most impressive example of Animator's ready-to-run animation
capabilities. P arti cul arly when choosing one of the ready-to-run optical
142 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

movements (such as Spin Small), you will feel like the executive producer, who
conceives an idea for a show and then directs the studio staff to handle the
details. Using Optics on a flic leads to an effect commonly used on television
advertising, in which numerous full-motion movies run on tilted or turning
cards as they zoom across the screen. The current flic is the default choice for
an optical element; if you forget to specify an element, Animator applies optics
to the current flic.
The other optical elements are simple polygons and spline shapes. In
themselves, they are not very interesting, but they can be quite effective if
combined with an exotic ink such as Jumble, Dark, or Glow. The final ele
ment choice is Outline, which draws a box around a flic or a eel, allowing
you to animate that outline (in the current ink color and brush size).

UNDERSTANDING 3-D MOTION

As far as the animator is concerned, opticals take some getting used to,
because: (a) people, unlike bats and birds, live most of their lives on the flat
surface of the Earth, and have neither a natural language nor a full concep
tion of true three-dimensional movement, and (b) the computer screen is a
two-dimensional output, and the mouse is a two-dimensional input. Anima
tor does not support true three-dimensional display: that would require rare
and expensive stereoscopic equipment, as Autodesk has demonstrated with
its experimental "Virtual Reality" projects. Likewise, Animator doesn't sup
port three-dimensional input, since this would require a data glove whose
position in space was fully tracked, or a three-dimensional digitizer such as
the product made by Polhemus.
Since there is no direct way to accept 3-D input and display 3-D out
put, then some compromises must be made. Animator simulates 3-D output
by transforming 2-D objects, such as eels, according to the laws of perspec
tive. Optical animations adhere to these laws, which include the following:

Far away objects are smaller than near objects

The edges of a rectangle are no longer parallel once the object is

turned slightly away from the viewer

Flat objects practically disappear when seen on edge

 Incorporating Opticals 143

And so on. If you can reproduce these effects of perspective, especially

while moving the object, you can satisfy the eye even in the absence of
stereoscopic clues-after all, most people are quite content to watch a
"flat" movie for hours without complaint.
Compromises in displaying 3-D motion are matched with compro
mises in defining 3-D movement. Because Animator can't track your hand as
you zoom a model of a jet fighter in front of your computer, you will have to
make do with indirect ways to describe that motion. Animator provides
three basic methods to describe motion: slider bars, mouse control, and pre
set formulas.

USING THE OPTICS SLIDER BARS

The first way to specify an optical effect is to define the final position
and orientation of the object by setting a series of slider-bar controls, as
shown in Figure 8.3. This is often the trickiest method. On the other hand,
when the proper final positions have already been worked out, through a
combination of reasoning, guesswork, and experimentation (as you will see
in the "Close Encounters" example in this chapter), it's quite easy to adjust
the slider bars to the given settings and then tell Animator to move the
object to its final position.

Figure 8.3: Slider bars for optics movements

In one sense, you already understand the essence of 3-D space because it
is built into your reflexes; the concept of up-down, right-left, and forward
backward is quite natural. In Animator, these three fundamental directions of
movement are given names borrowed from geometry: X, Y, and Z. The left
right direction is called X, the up-down direction is called Y, and the forward
backward direction is called Z. Animator's conventions are derived not only
144 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

from the practices you learned in high school geometry, but also from the real
ity of computer screens. In a geometry book, a movement in the same direction
as the Y axis goes up the page, but on a computer screen, a movement along the
Y axis has traditionally been defined as one that moves down the screen from
the top margin. This is because the computer image itself is scanned from top to
bottom. The X distance is simply the distance from the left margin of the
screen. The direction called Z is a simulated axis for movements that takes the
object deeper "behind" the screen or closer "in front" of the screen, towards
the viewer. Objects moving towards you are given negative numbers to specify
their location. These numbers can be entered by adjusting the X,Y, and Z slider
bars to the right or the left, as dipicted in Figure 8.4. Note that the slider bars are
flanked by icons that remind you of the direction for the movement.

Figure 8.4: Screen coordinates given by slider bars

As you might expect, the distance for movement in Animator is given

in terms of pixels, so moving an image 320 pixels on the X axis causes it to
disappear entirely from of the viewing area, on the right side. Movements
greater than 500 pixels along any axis are not allowed. You may have a prob
lem when you are trying to move an object too close to the observer. In this
situation, Animator is no longer able to calculate how to represent the object
on the screen, and refuses to try. You can usually solve this problem by back
ing off a bit on the point of nearest ''approach.''
The slider bars allow you to define the position and orientation for
your element to assume at the end of your chosen Time Select period: frame,
segment, or all frames. To assign the element an initial position, you can
either allow it to take its default position and orientation, which is in the
center of the screen, oriented in the same plane as the screen, or you can
adjust the initial position by changing the slider bars and rendering this opti
cal effect/or frame 1 only. Then to move from this initial position and ori
entation, select the Continue Move button before setting the next position,
 Incorporating Opticals 145

orientation, and path. You will see an example of the Continue Move option
in the UFO and fax sequences of this chapter.

USING MOUSE CONTROL

The second way to describe 3-D motion is to enlist the help of an ordi
nary two-dimensional mouse. This can reduce your reliance on graph paper,
rulers, or guesswork, as seen in Figure 8. 5. The mouse allows you to interac
tively change the tilt, location, and path of an element without typing in any
numbers. The ope drawback is that the mouse can adjust only one 2-D cross
section, or "slie," at a time, like the cross-sectional view in a blueprint.

Figure 8.5: The Mouse Control menu panel

To start on a blueprint of your home, for instance, you would simply

draw all the boundaries of the walls on the ground. In geometric terms, the
vertical distance, Z, would be zero everywhere. Thus Z drops out as a matter
of concern, and in geometric terms, you'd say that your blueprint is a pic
ture of the house "on an X-Y plane." If you draw a blueprint of the second
story, then mathematically you would say that this is another view on an
X-Y plane, but this time, (for instance) Z 12'. You would also be interested
=

in other planes, as well. In the house example, a front-view of the home

would be on the Z-Y plane and a side view would be on the X-Z plane. These
examples illustrate the significance of the XY, XZ, and ZY buttons in the
146 MASTERING ANIMATOR

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mouse Control panel. In practical terms:

XY moves the element left, right, up, and down

XZ moves the element left, right, in, and out

ZY moves the element in, out, up, and down

To use mouse control, click on the appropriate axis button in the

Mouse Control panel, then click on the screen to turn the element around
that axis. You can also click on the Spin, Size, Move, or Path button before
clicking on the drawing screen, if you wish to use the mouse to set these
items.

USING PRESET MOTIONS

Finally (method number three), you can dispense with all your detailed
planning and choose one of the preset motions already choreographed by
Animator's creators. This is often the easiest way to get results, but it may
not lead to quite the effect you had in mind. The Presets menu is accessed by
selecting Presets from the Optics menu selection bar shown in Figure 8.6.

Figure 8.6: T he Presets menu

 Incor porating Opticals 147

The preset movements are as follows.

MOVEMENT SIGNIFICANCE

Pull Back Gradually moves the element 500 units "behind"

the screen

Spin Spins the element around the Z axis one full turn

Twirl Spins the element around the X axis one full turn

Whirl Spins the element around the Y axis one full turn

Spin Small Spins the element around the Z axis one full turn,
while moving it "behind" the screen 500 units
(same as Spin plus Pull Back)

Squash Gradually shrinks the element vertically while

stretching it horizontally, by a factor of two in
each case

TIP
If you basically like these preset movements but want something
fancier, it's possible to modify them by adjusting the Optics panel
settings after selecting one of them.

Other options in this menu are not really movements; rather, they are
management options such as Clear All, which initializes the settings to an
empty state, and Files, which allows you to load and save optical-effects set
tings, as you will see.
You may be wondering, if optical effects are awkward to use, why
bother? The answer will be clear the first time you try one . Visually and crea
tively speaking, they are every bit worth the effort. Besides, as mentioned
above, much of the awkwardness comes from the lack of a natural language
to describe 3-D motions and the lack of a 3-D input device. By contrast,
many fascinating optical sequences are fairly straightforward from the view
er's standpoint, once the motion has been set up. This means that optical
effects are easier for you to learn by experimenting than by reading lengthy
written descriptions. Since a detailed analysis of all the ramifications of the
Optics options would be needlessly confusing, I've banished it from this
chapter. (Most of the gory details can be found in the Animator Reference
Manual.) I think you will discover these possibilities for yourself, once I've
shown you the way with an overview.
148 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

DESIGNING
DIFFERENT TYPES OF MOTION

For a solid object, all imaginable types of movement are the result of
some combination of spinning and displacement in space, technically called
rotation and translation. In addition, the Optics panel allows you to change
the apparent size of the object, although this is not, strictly speaking, a valid
category of ob;ect movement through space. Accordingly, the Optics panel
allows you to make the following kinds of directions for your cast:

Spin
With the Spin command, you can:

Define a center of rotation that is not the element's center-for

instance, it could be at the edge, like a swinging door, or even out
side of the object, like a playground swing

Define an axis for rotation not necessarily aligned with X, Y, and Z

Specify whether to a revolve only a few degrees or many complete

turns

Size
With the Size command, you can:

Define a center for shrinking or stretching, not necessarily aligned

with the center of the element-for instance, causing the element to
shrink to one side

Specify the shrink/stretch to occur horizontally, vertically, or both

Move
With the Move command, you can:

Perform straight line movement to a new X, Y, or Z location

Set the position interactively with the mouse

 Incorporating Opticals 149

Path
For Path, you can:

Use a spline curve for the motion path

Use a polygon for the motion path

Use a sampled freehand motion path

Use a timed freehand motion path

The motion Presets plus the movements just mentioned form the
essence of your optical effects. Note that the Optics panel also has a slot for
the current color, the current ink, and the Time, Filled, Mask, and Clear Key
buttons. Since the optical effect will be pasted to the screen using the cur
rent ink, you must always make sure that you're using the right ink before
you render the effect. You will want to use Opaque ink for any ordinary pur
pose, and occasionally, Glass ink for a double-exposure look. Remember
that if you want to paste an element to the screen with the Clear Key
method, the K button must be highlighted and the Key Color slot in the
Home panel must be set to the key color used in the element.

WARNING
It is highly unlikely that you would want to use strange inks such
as Spark or Vgrad, since any details in the element will be wiped
out when drawn to the screen with these inks.

After setting up your motion by choosing Preset, adjusting the slider

bars, or using the mouse, you are faced with two principal alternatives: you
can preview the movement using the Wireframe option, or you can com
plete the optical effect with the Use option.
Wireframe previews the effect by showing you the outline of your ele
ment moving across the screen with the same timing as the completed flic.
The Use option leads directly to the Time Select panel.
Once in the Time Select panel, you can make the effect permanent
with Render or get a comprehensive preview using the Preview option. The
Preview option actually uses the current ink to temporarily paste copies of
'
the element to each frame, so if you re using the wrong ink, it will be obvi
ous here. Preview runs considerably slower than the actual flic will, but has
150 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

the advantage of producing only a temporary version of the flic-one that

can be easily replaced by adjusting the Optics settings and running Preview
again.
You can cancel Preview by pressing the Escape key. Likewise, you can
cancel Render by pressing the Escape key. But once the Render has been
completed, it is permanent. Be sure you have a copy of your flic on disk
before you render an optical on top of it, just in case you change your mind.
To illustrate these concepts, let's take a lesson from that master of opti
cal effects, Douglas Trumbull, and imitate one of his UFO sequences from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We will begin by making a four-pointed
star surrounded by a diffraction halo, as seen in telescopes, and then turn it
into a "mascot" UFO like the will-o' -th e wisp that trailed the other space
-

craft in that movie.

USINGA CEL
FOR YOUR OPTICAL EFFECT

T he first step in making the star is to make its diffraction halo. In Close
Encounters, the UFO lights were red, but ours will be green.

1. Reset Animator, and go to the Palette panel. Select the HLS color
scheme and get a cluster of any six colors. Redefine the far-left
color as green, using HLS values 74 ,108,113; for the far-right
color, use 74 ,38,255. Use the Ramp option of the Value menu to
make this cluster a ramp of six green shades. These shades will form
the green glow.

2. Select the Rgrad ink and right-click to view its options. Using the
Center option, make a circle the size of a dime. Use Circle, filled,
with Rgrad ink to make a large circle holding many concentric
shaded circles. We want to isolate one of these circles for the halo
and erase all the others. Use Opaque ink and a filled circle to erase
all the inner circles except one slightly smaller than a tennis ball;
then erase the others using an unfilled circle with a wide brush,
such as brush size 7. T he result will look like the corona of a solar
eclipse, as illustrated in Figure 8. 7. Use the Clip option of the Swap
menu to save this image.
 Incorporating Opticals 151

Figure 8. 7: T he halo for a star

3. In this step, we will make a pattern for the four-pointed body of the
star. Clear the screen and choose the brightest green from your Mini
Palette, which was loaded with the default colors in Step 1. Use the
Star (filled) tool, with the number of points set to four and the inner/
outer radius ratio at 33 percent (the default value), as in Figure 8.8.
This is a temporary shape that we will modify with the Spline tool, so
Undo it to clear the screen. It will be retained in memory as the subject
of our Spline tool. Choose the Spline tool. Set both the Tension and
Continuity to 10. Choose Tween and the Set Start Position option,
then confirm the resulting shape with Do Tween. You will go to the
T ime Select panel, where the Total Frames box should read '' 1 . ' Select
'

Complete and To All, then select Render. T he star shape will have four
small holes; fill them with the Fill tool.

4. Get the star shape as a eel, then Trade it with the halo in the Swap
screen. With the K button lit and Opaque ink selected, use the Cel
menu's Stretch option to paste the star-shaped eel inside the halo
with the proper proportions.
152 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

Figure 8.8: A geometric star, ready for tweening

5. Now try touching up the star with the Bright and Dark inks. Add
some shading inside the body of the star with Bright ink at 30 per
cent. Overlay it with a circular highlight , using brush size 1 and
Bright ink. Highlight the center further with Bright ink. Use the
Line drawing tool to make cross-hair rays. These should extend out
as far as the halo. Add longer highlight rays using brush size 1. Save
this image, as shown in Figure 8.9, as GRNSTAR.GIF.

6. Finally, we will clone the star and make a UFO composed of two
stars. Use Clip to save your star as a eel; clear the screen and use
Paste and Opaque ink to move the eel to the lower right of the
screen. Use Paste again to add a twin star with an intersecting halo
to the upper left. Using Draw and the brighter greens in your Mini
Palette, blend the overlapping coronas together smoothly, as in
Figure 8.10. Since Animator seems to remember where a eel was
when it was captured, you should reposition the UFO to the center
of the screen. Do this by using the Get option, then clearing the
screen and pasting the UFO to the center of the screen. Save the
UFO eel as UFO.GIF and clip it into the buffer.
 Incorporating Opticals 15 3

Figure 8.9: The completed star

Figure 8.10: Our UFO is composed of twin stars.

154 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

INTRODUCING THE ELEMENT

Now that you have a starry eel, you can use it as an optical element. As
in any flic, the first step in opticals is to allot the frames. Then we will spec
ify the motion in a two-part sequence. In the following exercise, you will
introduce your element.

1. Choose Reset and New from the Flic menu and insert 44 frames.
Your eel will still be in the buffer; check it by clicking on the Move
option of the Cel menu, then right-click on the screen to cancel the
Move. Define frames 10 to 29 as Segment Band activate the S (seg
ment) button. The initial empty frames will provide a pause before
the UFO enters. Choose Optics from the Animator menu. This will
take you to the Optics panel. Select the Clear All option of the Pre
sets menu to make sure that there are no optics files in memory.
Then choose the Cel option of the Element menu. This is very
important and easy to f orget. The default element is a flic; to ani
mate a eel, you must make that choice explicitly.

2. Click on Spin and create the spin for the object by using the default
increments of one degree(" 11360" on your Turns panel). Do not
change the Center or Axis settings. Go to the Z-axis slider bar,
which is flanked by diagonal arrow icons. (These diagonal arrows
represent the Z axis, which points away from you, into the screen.)
Set the slider bar to - 1000, which specifies a clockwise movement
of 1000 degrees, just shy of three full turns. Click on Wireframe to
see the effect.

3. Click on Size, and move the Reduce bar to 20. Since the Size is the
ratio of reduce to enlarge, 20 over 100 gives a 20-percent reduc
tion. Click on Wireframe, and you will see the element shrink as it
spins, much as if you had used Spin Small.

4. Click on Move, and move the X slider to 106 and the Y slider to
- 63(that is, minus 63). Do not change Z. Click on Wireframe, and
the element will tumble into the upper right-hand corner. This
looks pretty neat, but it's just the opposite of the desired motion,
which calls f or the UFO to enter stage right and zoom towards us.
Don't worry, this is easily fixed in the Time Select panel. Without
making any Path settings, we have completely defined the move
ment. Now let's render the flic. Highlight the K button to use a clear
key background, and select Use.
 Incorporating Opticals 155

5. The Use option takes you to the Time Select panel. The S (segment)
and K buttons should be on, as well as the Complete and To Seg
ment buttons. Now highlight the In Slow button, which will let the
UFO build up speed when it first appears, and the Reverse button,
which will allow the UFO to wind up at the center of the screen
precisely where we want it. Select Preview, and the UFO will
flicker onto the screen frame by frame. When done, Animator waits
at the last frame of the preview for you to press Enter. Pressing
Enter clears the screen and restores the Time Select panel. To render
the segment, select Render. Then play the segment.

TIP
Note how we've arranged for the object to end up at the center of
the screen, regardless of the complexity of the motion or the avail
able time for the motion. This is a trick with many uses: define a
movement from the center of the screen and then render
backwards.

6. Save your optical path, using the Files option of the Presets menu.
Name it ENTER.OPT. Save your flic as UFO.FU.

COMPLETING THE MOTION

The UFO is currently zooming towards the audience, but as usual, I

like to provide more of a visual kick. This exercise will show you how to use
the Continue Move command to join one optical movement to the next, and
bring the UFO right up to their noses.

1. Define a segment for this approach movement. Go to the Frames

panel by right-clicking on the frame icons and set up frames 30
through 44 as Segment C. This leaves the last frame, frame 45,
blank and unaffected. Exit the Frames panel and enter the Optics
panel. Select the Continue Move option, which carries over the
current position and orientation of the element into the new move
ment. Unlike other buttons, Continue Move does not stay lighted
when selected.

2. Create a new movement for Segment C by choosing the Clear All

option of the Presets menu and selecting the Move button. Move
156 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

the Z slider bar to - 325. This brings the element close to the
viewer. Select Wireframe, and you will see the element shrink.
That's because you still have Reverse on , but we will fix that
momentarily. Select Use.

3. Now, in the Time Select menu, turn off Reverse but leave Com
plete, To Segment, and In Slow on. Choose Preview and watch the
UFO fill the screen, then choose Render. Play the completed flic.
Save your second optics file as APPROACH.OPT from the Files
selection of the Preset menu in the Optics panel.

COMPLETING THE FLIC

We haven't exhausted the creative possibilites here yet. For a more
ominious finale, we're going to make the UFO fill the screen with green light
before disappearing.

1. Insert two copies of frame 44, the last frame showing the UFO. In
frame 46, use the filled Circle tool to cover both stars entirely with
Opaque white ink. Play the flic, and you will see a flash at the end.
Adjust Segment C to extend from frame 30 through frame 46. Go to
the Palette menu. Choose some unused color slot in the 256 Color
Matrix to mix up an electric-green for tinting. Give this new color
the following HLS values: 85,169,255. Activate the T button and
the All button on the Palette panel . This will apply the tint to all
colors , not just the current cluster. Be sure to turn off Fit, or Anima
tor won't allow you to tint the picture.

2. From the Value menu, choose Tint. When prompted for the tint
source color, click on your new electric-green slot. When you see
the dialog box that asks

Max Tint Percent?

you should select 95 percent and click on OK. You will go to the
Time Select Menu panel, where the To Segment button will be high
lighted. Select Preview, and you will then see some indication of
the final result. Finally, choose Render. This time, the film will roll
frame by frame, but you will not see the tinting as it takes place.
Rest assured, though, that if you've turned off Fit, each frame is
indeed being tinted. Play the flic and you will see that this is so. As
the UFO approaches, the screen is filled with a bright, green glare.
 Incorporating Opticals 157

3. Once again, we're going to use the "dazzle" technique of inserting

a single negative frame. If you liked the flashbulb and the lightning
bolt, you're going to love the UFO flash. Go to the penultimate UFO
frame, frame 45, and use Negative to turn the frame purple. Be sure
to highlight the F button (for "to frame only") in the Time Select
menu before you select Render. This restricts the Negative effect to
frame 45. Play the flic again, and you will see the UFO enter the
screen, tumble and swirl, and then head straight for you, blinding
you with green light. At the instant before collision, it vanishes in a
green-purple-white flash! The last frame is empty, and its absence of
colors gives you more flexibility in joining this flic to some flic of
your own. Save the flic as UFO.FU.

COMBINING OPTICAL EFFECTS

WITH EXISTING ANIMATIONS

You just had a close encounter with opticals created from scratch, but a
prime application for optical effects is to enhance an animation developed
by some other means-tweening, for instance. Consider the fax animation
of Chapter 6 illustrating the concept ''receive your contract via fax.'' In that
exercise, you transformed your telephone into a faxed document.
But if you stop to think about it, every fax that comes out somewhere had
to go in somewhere else. Let's return to the fax flic and complete the picture.
This time, we will have the document turn into the phone, and the phone will
print out a fax output. Trust me, this will be worth it.
The first step is to load FAX.FU and use the Backwards command to save
it as FAXBACK.FLI. After saving the flic backwards, don't forget to load it
from the Flic menu, in order to replace FAX.FU as the resident flic. When you
play FAXBACK.FLI, you will see the fascinating effect of a very simple rectangle
being transformed into a more highly structured object.
You should have 30 frames at the end of your flic in which the phone is
stationary. Let's print out a fax in this segment, using opticals. The output
will appear underneath the phone and zoom up to the viewer.

1. First, turn off the K button, because we will be using black text and
we don't want it to be treated as a clear key. Go to frame 1, which
holds an image of the document. Using the System font and black
158 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

Opaque ink, print the word CONTRACT at the bottom of your

document. Get the contract as a eel, and use the Restore option of
the Pie menu to erase the word CONTRA CT if you'd rather not deal
with pasting it over all the frames that contain a stationary contract.

2. Go to the beginning of the segment where the telephone is station

ary, which in my flic is frame 4 7. With the Turns setting at 1I360,
adjust the X, Y , and Z slider bars to read 91, - 11, and 0. This will
flip the page along the X axis so that you see it on edge. Using the
Size control, reduce both the X and Y dimensions to 65 percent,
enabling it to fit underneath your phone. Use Move to position the
page underneath the phone, adj ustin g the X, Y, and Z slider bars
(for instance) to 144, 16, and 0. View the effects of these set
-

tings with Wireframe, and if they don't look right for your drawing,
adjust them further, either manually, or by using Mouse Control.
Highlight the F (Frame) button, and render the document under
neath the phone in the current frame, as shown in Figure 8.11.

Figure 8.11: The fax printing out under the phone

 Incorporating Opticals 159

3. Now that the fax has the proper initial position, let's make it zoom
forward. Move to the next frame and define a new segment, Segment
C, that starts on this frame and runs to the end of the flic. Click on S
for Segment. Click on Continue Move. Adjust the slider bars as fol
lows. Using 11360 turns, set X to -14. For the Spin Center, choose
232 for X, 120 for Y, and 0 for Z. For Size, choose Enlarge Both by
a factor of nine. For Move, choose 163 for X, 94 for Y, and - 19
for Z. Render this segment, and the fax will zip out from under the
telephone and zoom smoothly up to the screen, showing off the label
CONTRACT before it vanishes, as in Figure 8.12.

Figure 8.12: The fax in flight

Now when you play the flic, the document will tween into a phone,
and the fax will then glide up towards you from underneath the phone. I
think you will agree this is an effective use of both tweening and opticals.
160 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER EIGHT

SUMMARY

In this chapter, you've encountered the common uses of the Optics

tools. You now understand the Optics menu panel, how to choose elements
for animation, and how to describe 3-D motion using the X, Y, and Z axes, as
well as the screen coordinates. You've hopefully experimented with Mouse
Control and the Preset motions as you designed different kinds of motions.
You also learned how to use the W ireframe, Use, Preview, and Render
buttons to execute optical tricks. We concentrated on two-part movements,
making use of the Continue Move button to build up continuous sequences .
This concludes your basic training in creating four of the five kinds of Ani
mator flies: color cycling , tweening, titles, and opticals. As mentioned pre
viously, we aren't going to explore traditional hand-drawn eel animation as
supported by the Trace menu because that's the province of the serious stu
dio animator, not the business communicator. Fortunately, much of what
hand-drawn eel animation aims for can be accomplished automatically
using Optics functions on a eel.
So okay: now you have several flies. Now what? Well , you need to
combine them , of course , to make a coherent presentation. This is the sub
ject of the next chapter. Be sure to bring your flies!
CHAPTER

NINE

EDITING FLICS
AND ADDING
SPECIAL EFFECTS
 This chapter describes animation on a
level beyond the "flic" stage. You've been learning the art of the successful
presentation-beautiful frames, arresting segments, and riveting flies-but
it's neither practical nor convenient to build a presentation from one contin
uous flic. This chapter is your introduction to an alternative (it is also a peek
at one of the most exciting developments in the field of affordable computer
graphics since the introduction of Autodesk Animator).

SAFEGUARDING YOUR WORK

Assigning an entire presentation to a single flic would be like putting all

your eggs in one basket, because of practical space and color limitations and
the risk of loss. Single flies are limited to 256 colors, unless you're willing to
tolerate a little "snow" (white speckles on your VGA screen) each time the
VGA card loads a new palette. In order to show several video-captured
images in your flic, each with its own private universe of shades, you either
have to accept snow or use the One Palette option to squeeze the palettes of
all the frames to the same 256 colors. Unfortunately, this sometimes intro
duces objectionable banding and false colors in smoothly shaded images.
More importantly, large flies are unwieldy to load, store, and maintain.
They require large amounts of h ard-disk space, and once a flic grows beyond
lMb, you're faced with the problem of trying to fit it onto a floppy disk for
backup or distribution. The most serious consequence of confining your entire
presentation to one flic is the risk of loss , whether due to problems with your
disk or damage you cause to the flic while editing it.

TIP
Prepare now for the eventuality of "problems" with your hard
disk. You should consider system management utilities such as PC
Tools Deluxe a necessity, because they can help recover lost data
from defective sectors on hard or floppy disks. Remember, you
have to outsmart your computer, or it will outsmart you!
 Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 165

Fortunately, the individual flic is not the final level of production in

Animator, so there's no reason to put all your eggs into one artistic basket.
An Animator script links flies together into feature-length presentations and
provides a concise and powerful method for controlling playback.

NOTE
Scripts can be used only by the Autodesk Player program, not by
Animator itself, but this should not cause problems.

This chapter shows how to link flies using scripts, but before we
embark on that topic, you need to know about the other ways to link flies in
an even more intimate fashion: joining and compositing. These two meth
ods allow you to combine two flies into a single flic. When you switch from
one flic to the next with a clean cut or a transition, this is known as ajoin.
When you merge the images of two flies, this is called a composite.
Since the transitions provided by the Join function often give rise to
special effects, this chapter is a good place to discuss other sources of special
effects for your flies, but let's begin with a look at the Join and Composite
functions.

JOINING A ND COMPOSITING FLICS

To join two flies, load one of them (we will call this one' 'Flic A'') using
the Files option of the Flic menu, and then load the other (' 'Flic B") with the
Join command. When you choose the Join option of the Flic menu, you will
see the menu box shown in Figure 9 .1. Here you have the option of joining
Flic B so it either precedes or follows Flic A. Note that if you change your
mind, you can cancel the Join command. After you choose, another menu
appears, allowing you to specify whether you wish to cut cleanly from flic
to flic or to use a transition effect, as shown in Figure 9.2.
The Transition Type menu provides the following choices:

OPTION EFFECT
Fade Out The last frame of the original flic fades to black, and
the first frame of the next flic lightens from black.
166 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

Figure 9.1: The Join menu

OPTION EFFECT

Wipe The first frame in the second flic is drawn over the last
frame of the original flic, like a curtain.

Venetian The last frame of the original flic is replaced by the

first frame of the next flic as if painted on a horizontal
Venetian blind.

Dissolve Pixels from the last frame of the original flic are
replaced at random by pixels from the first frame of
the next flic.

Circle Wipe The first frame of the second flic is displayed over the
last frame of the original flic as if viewed through an
expanding iris.

The Composite option is potentially more powerful than the Join

option. Composite combines flies by superimposing their images. I haven't
 Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 167

Figure 9.2: The transition selections for Join

included an exercise with Composite because using it properly is a bit tricky.

After some experimentation, I have determined that Composite works reli
ably only when the range of colors in both flies has been squeezed to consid
erably less than 256. Composite seems to have some difficulty in managing
all the excess colors generated by superimposure of two images.

TIP
If you want to composite two flies, try squeezing the total colors
in each Hie to fewer than 100 before using Composite.

MAKING A PICTURE INTO A FLIC

As you may have guessed, there is a close relationship between a pie

and a flic. When you use the New command of the Flic menu, Animator pro
vides you with a new flic consisting of one frame. This frame can be saved in
168 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

a compressed format as a GIF file (which is what is meant by a pie). It could

also be saved as a one-frame flic. Conversely, if you've saved an image as a
GIF file, you can turn it into a flic by duplicating it from one frame to the
next using addition or multiplication options in the Frames menu.

JOINING TWO FLICS

To experiment with Join, let's make two simple flies. Reset Animator and
load the TEST3.GIF test pattern developed in Chapter 5. Go to the Frames
menu and use the Insert button to add about twenty copies of this frame. Now
you have a file that we will call Flic B, even though it contains an unchanging
image, rather than action. Save the file as CHIEF.FU using the Files option of
the Flic menu. Reset Animator again and load the BARS.GIF picture developed
in Chapter 5. In the Frames menu, use the Insert button to add about twenty
copies of this frame, thereby creating a new flic we will call Flic A. Then select
the Join option of the Flic menu. The Join Flic? dialog box appears, prompting
you to choose whether to join Flic B to the end of Flic A (choice 1) or to the start
of Flic A (choice 2). Choose 1.
After you select the To End option, another dialog box appears, allow
ing you to choose a clean cut (choice 1) or a transition effect (choice 2).
Choose 2, for transition, and then choose Dissolve from the final menu (the
Transition Type menu). The Dissolve effect uses a houndstooth intermedi
ate pattern that resembles a television screen beset with interference
between two broadcasts. A dialog box will appear, prompting you to choose
the number of frames over which the transition will occur. Click on OK to
use the default value, and the result will be a flic composed of the color bars
fading into the black-and-white pattern. You can save this new flic as
2TPAT. FLI.

THE STRUCTURE
OF A TYPIC AL PRESENTATION

As discussed in the chapter on effective presentations, the ancient

introduction/body/conclusion format is the most reliable formula for pre
sentations. The implications of this scheme for developing content are dis
cussed in that chapter, but a typical introduction/body/conclusion structure
 Editing Flies and Adding Spec
ial Effects
169

can also be described in terms

of Animator flies (or sequence
s) as follows:
INTRODUCTION

Sequence 1

Transition 1-2

Sequence 2

. . . etc.

BODY

Sequence 4

Transition 4-5

Sequence 5

Transition 5-6

. .. etc.

CONCLUSION

Sequence 9

Transition 9-10

Sequence 10

. . . etc.

T he transitions in this list

can come from various sou
rces:

A transitional flic (including

a simple cut transition) crea

the Join command ted with

A simple cut provided by

a script

A white fade-in/fade-out pro

vided by a script

Often, the most effective way

to transition between Flic A
to create a transitional flic, and Flic B is
''Flic A to B,'' in which the
the first scene in Flic Bare last sce ne in Flic A and
joined by one of the transitio
n effects. T hen you
170 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

can use a script to play the sequence seamlessly. The following is a simple
example:

1. Flic A

2. Flic A to B

3. Flic B

In addition to the transition effects just described, you can also use an ele
gant white fade-out/fade-in effect that can be imposed by an Animator script.
For educational purposes, we will be somewhat loose in tailoring the content of
our presentation to fit the requirements for an introduction, body, and conclu
sion, because the aim here is to construct a showcase for your efforts so far, not
to drive home a particular point. Here's a suggestion for a "demo reel" based on
the pies and flies you've created while working your way through Mastering
Autodesk Animator. Note that this outline specifies both the flies and the transi
tions that might occur in a transitional flic.

INTRODUCTION

Color bars test pattern

Dissolve

"Indian Head" test pattern

Cut

"Indian Head" pattern with title

Circle Wipe

BODY

Photographer's iris sequence

Circle wipe

Fax sequence

Venetian blinds transition

Lightning sequence

Cut

UFO sequence
 Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 171

BODY

Circle wipe

Road sequence

Cut

CONCLUSION

Goodbye message (over road still)

Cut

Road sequence, reprise

(optional: Circle wipe)

(optional: "That's All, Folks" sequence)

TIP
Keep in mind that in addition to using a lot of scenes in this short
presentation, we're using several rather flashy transitional effects
that would be out of place in most professional video applica
tions, notably our circle wipes and venetians. These might be
found in an advertisement or a music video, where the intent is to
generate a visually arresting display, but they should be used with
discretion in corporate communications. Even when one of these
rather hackneyed effects is appropriate, you should still strive for
consistency. In serious applications , you should not use a circle
wipe for one transition and a venetian the next. A film director's
preferred choice for transitions between scenes is a clean cut, fol
lowed by smooth cross-fades, with dissolves probably a distant
third.

WRITING SCRIPTS

Recall your introduction to scripts in Chapter 1, where you learned

how easy it is to compose a script. A script is no more than a listing of
p ath names that tells Autodesk Player where to find your flies, and the order
172 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

to play them in. A script contains instructions for the following aspects of a
presentation:

Location

ACTION SYMBOL

The order of flies (required) [Given by. the list]

The relative path-names for flies [The filenames]

(required)
or
The absolute pathname fo r flies [Drive:\direetory\name]

Speed, etc.

ACTION SYMBOL

How many times to replay a flic L<0-999>

(to loop)
At what relative speed to play a S<0-120>
flic

Transitions

ACTION SYMBOL

What transition between a pair T<fadein, fadeout, cut>

of flies

Seconds of pause on a flic's P<0-14400>

last frame

End Action

ACTION SYMBOL

Play another script Link [script pathname]

Replay the flies just listed Loop< 0-999>

I
Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 173

ACTION SYMBOL

Exit to Player ExitToPlayer

Exit to DOS ExitToDOS

Security

ACTION SYMBOL

Disable the keyboard during Control [character]

playback

Re-enable the keyboard Control [character]

As you can see from this list, the only strict requirement for writing a
script is that you list the names of the flies in the appropriate order; every
thing else is optional and has simply been provided to give you more control
over the playback if you need it. The absolute or full pathname (which
includes the name of the disk drive) is needed only if Player and the flic are
not in the same subdirectory. The Speed setting specifies a relative delay
between frames, zero being the smallest possible delay. Any pause is given in
seconds, so that the number 14400 corresponds to four hours. The Loop
command replays the list of flies given above it anywhere up to 999 times.
The default transition between flies is a simple cut, but you can specify
either a fade-in or a fade-out to white, or both, with the words fadein and
fadeout. You can also replace one of these words with the word cut.
Here is a typical script file:

Moddulec:\flics\bars.fli -p2

c:\flics\bar2tpat.fli

c:\flics\testpat.fli -13

c:\flics\tp2name.fli

c:\flics\nameiris.fli

In this example, the color bars flic is shown, with a pause of two sec
onds before running a Dissolve transition flic. Then the Indian Head test pat
tern follows, running for three times its original length by means of looping.
In the tp2name flic, the title of the demo reel is brought in by a Dissolve
174 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

between a frame without the title and a frame with the title, followed by
another transitional flic in which the title frame is replaced with the first
frame of the iris flic via a Circle Wipe. If this script were named leader, you
could run it by issuing the following command:

aaplay leader

T his example should give you a general overview; many other

examples are given in the Animator documentation. Now let's move ahead
to the topic of special effects.

ADDING SPECIAL EFFECTS

The Effects option of the Flies menu, shown in Figure 9.3, allows you to
apply the following special effects over a frame, a segment, or an entire flic:

Shrink the flic to half size, and play it in the up per-left corner (this
miniature flic could be moved to the center of the screen with the
Optics Move command)

Expand part of a flic to double size, as determined by the contents

of the Zoom window at x 2 magnification

Display only part of a flic, selected by cropping with a user-defined

window, similar to the Get option of the Cel menu

Paste motion trails behind a moving object

Pixelate the flic into area-averaged pixels of a given size

Render two-color, dithered versions of the flic (Engrave and Lace);

the colors are whatever colors are in Color Matrix slots O and 1

Create a greyscale version of the flic

Paste frame numbers in the upper-right corner using the far-left

color in the Mini- Palette; these can be removed with the Unblue
Frame selection of the Trace menu

Some of these effects have limited usefulness. For instance, the

Engrave and Lace options work best in a strongly shaded flic with a Victo
rian look.
 Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 175

Figure 9.3: The Effects menu

The Shrink option uses pixel averaging to reduce flies, and can pro
duce an effective miniature TV-news graphic if the parent flic does not con
tain small lettering. In particular, Shrink is a good way to take titles rendered
in a large font such as Post 42 and reduce them in size.

TIP
I have used Shrink to produce small glittering titles that seem to be
carved from gold. Starting from a Swap screen composed of wavy
gradients between yellow and purple-brown, I applied titles using
Scrape ink, followed by application of Emboss and Bright inks.

The Crop option can be used to isolate a key portion of a flic for special
emphasis, either before or after the flic itself is displayed. Use this method to
zoom in on an area for closer inspection.
176 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

The Grays Only option can send your presentation back to the 1950s
or earlier; it can also be used to preview an image that will be exported for
desktop publishing.
Motion trails can be highly effective in suggesting motion blur or
speed. They can even be used in more specialized applications to extrude a
flat shape into a 3-D object. Your reference manual explains how to use the
Transparent, Zero Clear, and Key Color Clear options.
These functions are all quite easy to use. Simply load your flic and
choose one of these options from the Effects menu. If the Time button is off,
the effect will be applied only to the current frame. To apply the effect to a
segment or to the whole flic, activate the Time button and the appropriate F,
S, or A button.

USING
AUTODESK'S OTHER SOFTWARE

Animator is designed to work with other Autodesk products, includ

ing the company's mainstay, AutoCAD. If your job involves engineering or
architecture, then you probably already know AutoCAD, the industry's
most successful computer-aided design software. In its current incarnation,
Release 11, AutoCAD offers an environment for both 2-D and 3-D object
modeling and shading, as shown in Figure 9.4. It also provides an interface
to photo-realistic images through Pixar's Renderman scene-description lan
guage. Using the Animation ToolKit (ATK), you can automatically produce a
sequence of AutoCAD slide or render files. T hese sequential images can then
be turned into an Animator flic by running the Animator Flimaker program.
These issues are discussed in the AutoShade 2. 0 documentation, but because
of their specialized nature, they are beyond the scope of this book. If you
have purchased AutoCAD Release 11, your dealer will provide you with the
support you need to get the most out of it.
There is now an exciting alternative to AutoCAD for designing 3-D
scenes for your animations-30 Studio; we will cover it right after we take a
look at Autodesk's Clips software.

USING AUTODESK IMAGECELS

The Clips are comprised of a library of textures termed ImageCels, and

include a library of hand-drawn eel animations. You might think of them as
 Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 177

Figure 9.4: AutoCAD Release 11 (figure courtesy of George Omura)

an animator's version of the clip art used in desktop publishing. The first
two offerings in the ImageCels series are: Volume I, which contains textures
of man-made objects, such as stucco, tile, and fabric; and Volume II, which
contains natural textures, such as metals, marble, water, and sky. These tex
tures are saved as carefully designed eels that can be used to fill shapes
such as the wall of room-using Tile ink and the Fill tool. These eels have
been edge-matched to guarantee that they will fill an area without showing
seams when using Tile ink, as shown in Figure 9.5.
Besides textures, there are scanned-in objects saved as Animator eels.
Volume I contains doors, boats, and cars. Volume II contains trees, shrubs,
and people, as seen in Figure 9.6. Using eel or optical animation, y ou can
scoot these cells around to produce interesting and quirky flies, but more
importantly, they can be repositioned and resized at will to provide a client
with some before-and-after concept in real estate, landscaping, or construc
tion. They can also be popped into a business presentation element such as a
pie chart to illustrate an idea metaphorically.
178 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

Figure 9.5: An ImageCel texture applied with Tile ink

Figure 9.6: ImageCel trees and people

I I

Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 1 79

IMPOR TING ANIMATIONS FROM CLIPS

In addition to the ImageCels , Autodesk sells a series of small animation

files that can be incorporated into your presentations. The initial offering is a
whimsical library called "Animals/Fantasy," which provides a cast of meta
phors to help get your ideas across. For instance, there is a charming sequence
of a squirrel who enters stage right with an acorn in its mouth, buries it with a
knowing glance at the viewer, and exits stage left, succintly illustrating the vir
tues of thrift and foresight. Part of this flic is shown in Figure 9. 7. The flic has
been saved with a squeezed palette, which helps it harmonize with the color
limitations of the palette in your existing flic. You can Join this flic t o an existing
sequence and add your own message with the Titling tools. As you might guess
from my emphasis on natural effects, Autodesk'sfirering clip, illustrated in Fig
ure 9.8, is a personal favorite of mine. It shows a circus hoop catching fire, all
colorfully and gracefully rendered by artist Ann Petersen, and seems perfect for
the message "We jump through hoops for our clients.''

Figure 9.7: The squirrel from the Animals/Fantasy Clips

180 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

Figure 9.8: T he hoop of fire from the Animals/Fantasy Clips

USING AUTODESK 3D STUDIO

If you enjoy running Animator on your '386 machine, you're going to

love 3D Studio, which brings a whole new dimension to presentations. To
understand a powerful and sophisticated program like 3D Studio, it's some
times best to start at the desired effect and work your way backwards. Starting
at the end of the "assembly line" for animation and working to the start, we
encounter the following software modules:

MODULE SIGNIFICANCE

Renderer. Shades and colors each scene and creates the

graphics display

Keyframer Assigns motions to objects

Materials Editor Defines surface properties for objects

 Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 181

MODULE SIGNIFICANCE

30 Editor Introduces geometric primitives, modifies custom

objects, assigns hierarchies, positions, and
orientations

30 Lofter Creates custom objects, including smoothly rounded

shapes, from 2-D cross-sections

20 Shaper Creates cross-sections for custom objects

This may seem like a lot of software and a lot of steps, and you might won
der why there are so many. A 3-D animation program automates the process of
drawing and shading 3-D scenes so that you are free to design the animation on
a higher level. For instance, when Stanley Kubrick makes a film, he doesn't
bother to sketch and paint every frame by hand; he assembles his cast, his back
grounds, and his camera angles, and gives general directions. He's obviously got
better things to do than figure out how to create the illusion of a camera moving
through a room-something the Disney crew must surely agonize over for days
on end.
Without 3-D software, it's up to you to create the illusion of 3-D
objects in 3-D space. To make a telephone tumble across the screen, you
have to redraw the phone as seen from a different angle on practically every
frame of your flic. With 3-D software, however, you create an initial mathe
matical model of the telephone, and the software automatically calculates
its appearance, including shading from light sources and the effects of per
spective , while it executes any motion you specify. Now I imagine you
understand why 3-D software is so powerful, complex, and expensive-not
to mention impressive.
The Renderer software module takes over at the end of 3D Studio's
assembly line and provides a choice of three graphics file formats for output:
TIFF, GIF, and Targa. For specialized applications, you can export a still
frame to a desktop publishing program via a full-color or greyscale Tag
Image File Format (TIFF) file.
The common way to show 30 Studio animations is to produce an Ani
mator flic for real-time recording. The advantage of this method is that you
can combine your 3-D animation with the obvious price/performance
advantages of Autodesk Animator. With Animator, you can start with an
ordinary VGA card, add an NTSC encoder such as the Jovian Logic VIN, and
pla y the animation in real time for direct recording by an inexpensive VCR.
This method lets you add Animator's considerable 2-D animation talents to
your 3-D movie.
182 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

T he limited resolution of Animator can be a drawback, however, since

human vision is less tolerant of grainy images in moving 3-D scenes than in
flat 2-D sequences, and you may find an Animator version of your movie too
blurry. Therefore, another way to record 3D Studio animation involves
frame grabbers such as the Vision Technologies Vision 16 or the more pow
erful Truevision Targa+ , both of which use Targa files that support over
32,000 colors on-screen at a 512 x 480 pixel resolution. Since a Targa file
occupies half a megabyte of disk space, it's not feasible to do real-time ani
mation with these boards, even with the powerful ' 386 chip required to run
3D Studio. Instead, scenes are rendered, saved to disk, and recorded a single
frame at a time on an industrial, frame-accurate editing V CR using a
Diaquest single-frame VCR controller card. The resulting image is razor
sharp and stunning , but comes at a price, since a Diaquest card costs about
$2000, and a frame-accurate VCR costs in excess of $6000. Frame grabbers
cost between $1000 and $2000. ( 3D Studio, by the way, has a list price of
about $ 3 000.)
To choreograph motion, including the animator's classic ''squash and
stretch" gimmic ks, 3D Studio uses methods that are an extension of the
1\veen and Optics tools of Animator. Objects are given initial and final posi
tions, sizes, and orientations in keyframes. Using the Keyframer module,
you set up the camera motions, movements of objects and any number of
lights, and then instruct 3D Studio to execute the motions.
W ith the Materials Editor, you can assign material properties to
objects-color, transparency, texture, and reflectivity. You can select the
materials from a library of previously designed materials or design new ones
yourself.
T he 3D Editor, as seen in F igure 9.9, allows you to work with 3-D
objects in the following ways: you can edit and arrange the objects, their
light sources, and the "camera" viewpoints. You can modify the "mesh" of
the flat polygons that make up an object and combine simple objects to
create ones of higher complexity, such as a hand with fingers and finger
nails. You can also use the 3D Editor to introduce primitive 3-D shapes, such
as spheres, cones, and cubes.
With the 3D Editor, you can adjust the shading options, using flat shad
ing or smoothed Gouraud or Phong shading, and can specify which graphics
file format you want to use: Animator-style GIF, high-resolution GIF, or
Targa.
Still working our way backwards in the animation process, we next
encounter the 30 Lofter module, which allows you to model custom
ob jects, such as trains and koala bears, that are not reducible to intersecting
3-D primitives such as spheres, cones, and cubes. T he Lofter creates a model
 Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 183

Figure 9.9: The 30 Editor

of any imaginable object much as a ship-builder would-by fitting various

cross-sections along a given spine, as illustrated in Figure 9.10. The whole
process usually begins within the 20 Shaper, where the cross-sections are
designed for incorporation into the 30 Lofter model. This module also
allows you to enter text composed of Bezier splines which can be extruded
into solid objects and transformed via tweening.
This is only scraping the.surface-30 Studio needs a book of its own,
considerably larger and more detailed than ours, to reveal its power. I
haven't even mentioned fog effects, background options, or, perhaps best of
all, reflection mapping-a way to render photorealistic objects more effi
ciently than with ray-tracing. In Autodesk's 30 Studio Demo Reel video
tape, the combined power of several Autodesk products are brought to bear,
including Cellular Automata Lab and Animator, which were used to create
elegantly shifting optical textures for fire and water. I have used a pre
release version of 30 Studio to simulate a fly-by of a geometric solid known
as a great dodecahedron, and to render the object as if it were carved from
glass, as shown in Figure 9 .11.
184 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER NINE

Figure 9.10: T he 3D Lofter

SUMMARY

In this chapter, you've seen why scripts are so important, and you've
learned how to write them. We've covered the various ways to move from
one flic to another, either with a simple cut; a fade-out/fade-in using white,
available from your script; a fade-out/fade-in using black, available from the
Join menu; or more exotic transitions such as Dissolve, Venetian, and Circle
Wipe.
We've analyzed the logical and practical structure of a presentation,
and you've learned about the role of specially designed transitional flies in
seamless presentations. We've covered special effects such as Shrin k, Crop,
and Trails, and you've encountered the extraordinary sophistication that
comes from combining Animator with other Autodes k products, such as
AutoCAD Release 11, ImageCels, the animation libraries in Autodesk Clips,
and perhaps best of all, 3D Studio.
 Editing Flies and Adding Special Effects 185

Figure 9.11: A flic created with 30 Studio

This brings you to the state of the art in producing flies. But never for
get, our real goal is not to produce flies, but to say something valuable with
this new medium. Let's push on to the next chapter!
PERFECTING
PRESENTATIONS
CHAPTER

TEN

DESIGNING
EFFECTIVE
PRESENTATIONS
 The market for computer-generated
animation is hungry for new products and technology. Nick Arnett, a widely
published writer on multimedia, predicted before the 1 989 release of Auto
desk Animator that the product could sell as many as 50,000 copies in 1990,
perhaps as many as 100,000. Animator's po pularity can be traced, in part, to
two facts; many people are already heavily engaged in presenrntions, and
they want to use a medium that is more dynamic that a slide show.
Consider author Robin Raskin's assertion that "Businesses, schools,
and other concerns make an estimated 16 to 30 million presentations every
day.'' You can find Raskin's report in the F ebruary 1989 issue of PC Comput
ing. William Coggshall, the president of Desktop Presentations, Inc.,
believes that the worldwide market for hardware, software, and accessories
for desktop presentations will grow to $7.1 billion by 19 92, up from $2.4
billion in 1987. T his is a compound annual growth rate of 24 percent. Argu
ments such as these justify this kind of speculation:

Millions of people produce or attend business presentations, and

they're ex posed to increasingly so phisticated images.

T he price/performance ratio of the products is improving each year.

T hey're easier to budget and use, requiring fewer employee hours.

The marketing efforts of the major multimedia vendors, such as

A uto d es k, NEC, and Panasonic, are beginning to make an impact.

Ask yourself why business presentations are so important. G.A. Marken, a

communications consultant in Sunnyvale, California, reasons that if eight peo
ple, each with an annual salary of $ 40,000, attend a meeting, that meeting will
cost the company more than $ 300 per hour in salaries alone. T herefore, com
panies have a great incentive to try new ways to make points efficiently and
effectively. Indeed, there seems to be a kind of "visual arms race" going on. In a
recent article on color in presentations, it was suggested that as long as every
one is using an HP Laserjet laser printer to print out charts, audiences will be
fairly pleased with the handouts, but once someone begins to provide color
handouts from a printer such as the HP PaintJet inkjet printer, audiences will
 Designing Effective Presentations 19 1

expect the same from everyone. The same is true when audiences accustomed
to slide shows are shown an Animator flic for the first time.
The "big five" presentation packages in 1988 were, in order of popular
ity: Software Publishing Corporation's Harvard Graphics, Lotus's Freelance
Plus, Ashton-Tate's Chart-Master, Hewlett-Packard's Graphics Gallery II, and
Microsoft's Chart. Harvard Graphics was far and away the most popular, and it
is generally agreed that its overall performance is the best of the lot. Esthetically
speaking, though, it's darned hard to get excited about its production values
once you've seen Animator pictures. As the 1990s dawned, none of these pro
grams had been upgraded to support animation. They are usually used for
slides, handouts, or graphics for deskto p publishin g, but you can continue to
work with these packages and import their images into Animator, using the
methods described in the chapter on capturing and printing graphics.
This chapter will show you how to inject high octane into an Animator
presentation and should be especially helpful to readers who can paint won
derful pictures but want more experience in technical communication. It
begins with an analysis of winning presentations and discusses how to use
your time effectively through planning and organization. For starters you
will learn some reliable techniques for developing your themes. Consider
this chapter your crash course in power-presentation techniques.

UNDERSTANDING
THE PRESENTER'S ART

The advent of sophisticated personal computers by no means invali

dates the basic requirements for effective communication that you learned
in Speech 101. All presentations have conflicting requirements. I have noted
a few of the conflicts here:

Completeness versus conciseness

Precision versus simplicity

Novelty versus consistency

Critical discrimination versus restraint

192 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TEN

BALANCING
COMPLETENESS AND CONCISENESS

Your presentation must be reasonably complete, but on the other

hand, it shouldn't ramble. You should firmly pin down the real message and
eliminate all that is peripheral to it. This is easier to do if you budget time for
working that out with the care it deserves and get a second opinion-see
Figure 10.1.

Figure 10.1: Budget your time for planning

BALANCING
PRECISION AND SIMPLICITY

The most effective presentations are simple ones. But you should avoid
oversimplifying your ideas at the expense of precision. Simplify the issues
enough to avoid needless qualifications, trivia, or confusing complications.
 Designing Effective Presentations 193

Remember that all facts do not carry the same weight, and there are always
some aspects of your topic that can be safely glossed over. If you are careful not
to simplify too much, then you won't discard valuable information.
The issue of keeping things simple leads to the following advice on "stat
ing the obvious." A willingness to state the obvious is a distinguishing character
istic of the professional communicator. In the first place, it is unfair to assume
that all listeners have the same level of familiarity with the topic. What is obvi
ous to some won't be obvious to all. Moreover, it helps to begin with statements
of well-known or generally accepted facts, particularly when discussing a con
troversial topic. The main reason for this is that, without a familiar starting
point, you have no solid foundation on which to construct the ideas that will
lead the audience from their present state of knowledge. (You will see what I
mean throughout this chapter.) Finally, one of the main reasons that people
neglect to begin with the obvious is a terror of boring the audience. Never let
this fear stand in the way of beginning properly! Audiences are not bored by
being told what they already know, as long as you move efficiently from that
point to the heart of your presentation.

BALANCING
CONSISTENCY AND NOVELTY
Consistency is always an invaluable and impressive feature. Don't
worry that there will be no surprises if you always use the same terminology,
fonts, and screen layouts. (For example, if you call an agency a "planning
commission" at one point, don't call it an "advisory authority" somewhere
else. Once you've chosen your terms, consider them cast in stone.) Novelty
and freshness assert themselves best in the secure environment of a well
structured presentation.

BALANCING CRI TICAL

DISCRIMATION AND RESTRA IN T
Avoid negatives whenever possible-see Figure 10.2. The paragraphs
immediately above, for instance, were edited on second draft so that, rather
than sounding like warnings to predict possible failure, they became sugges
tions for ensuring success. The difference in effect is simply amazing. It is
important to impress your audience as a perceptive, discriminating author
ity, while at the same time sounding generous and encouraging.
194 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TEN

Figure 10.2: Stay as upbeat as possible

USING YOUR TIME WISELY

These simple rules, largely drawn from the curriculum of oral communi
cation, should form the foundation of any ordinary presentation created with
Animator. What they don't cover, however, are the added considerations that
come when you add graphics to your presentations. So let's explore some of
these communication issues more fully. But before we do, I'd like to turn over
to you the key to any live presentation: know your allotted time and stick to it.
Yes, there's a chance that what you have to present will be so important or so
stirring that your audience will lose all track of time and beg for more . But don't
gamble on that rather unlikely possibility. Few errors antagonize an audience
more than a speaker who won't quit. Once again, know your allotted time, and
stick to it .
The average attention span is between ten and twenty minutes; no
matter how dedicated the audience or how thrilling the subject, consider
 Designing Effective Presentations 195

yourself skating on thin ice when you try to exceed that. A skilled profes
sional can work wonders in that amount of time, while the unprepared will
utterly squander it. Therefore, you should spend plenty of time planning
and organizing your presentation.

PLA NNING YOUR PRESENTATION

Before you start planning, you should know the following:

Who is funding the presentation?

What does the funder expect from the presentation? In particular,

are there certain restrictions or expectations in regards to content
or style?

What's the budget, and how is it to be allocated?

What's the deadline for delivery?

What's the subject of the presentation?

What's the theme?

Who is the audience? How large is the audience?

What are the hot buttons for your audience? Results, evidence,
issues, votes, profits, growth, news? In other words, what is going
to grab their attention?

What reaction must the presentation elicit from the audience?

What is the expected length of the piece? (How long will they sit
still for your spiel?)

ORGANIZING YOUR THOUGHTS

The collective experience of communicators points to at least one

sure-fire way to deliver your presentations: (a) tell them what you're about
to tell them, (b) tell them, and (c) tell them what you just told them. These
196 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TEN

three phases require your presentation to have an introduction, a body, and

a conclusion. If this sounds like advice to repeat yourself, that's because it
is-see Figure 10.3.

TIP
Once again, don't be terrified of boring your audience by telling
them something they already know (that is, something you've
already said). Redundancy is reassuring, and helps in memorizing
the take-home message. Also, people understand messages in dif
ferent ways; restating your key points guarantees that more of the
audience will understand them.

If you approach your piece knowing that it will usually have an intro
duction, body, and conclusion, it should be easy to get started organizing.

Figure 10.3: The structure of a typical presentation

 Designing Effective Presentations 197

The actual place to begin, however, is with the body. As a rule of thumb,
develop your introduction last.

INTRODUCING YOUR TOPIC

As explained by Karen McGraw in Sybex Books' Mastering Power

Point, an introduction can be broken down into three subsections:

A title

An optional purpose

An agenda

These elements are part of what communications researchers call

mC'tadiscourse. The term metadiscourse is a fancy way of saying that these
elements are not concerned with the actual subject matter-a new airport in
Orlando designed with AutoCAD, for instance, or the urban reforestation
program on Glenwood Drive-but rather with the presentation itself. It's a
higher level of communication, concerned with establishing a consensus
about the agenda for the presentation.
Audiences have come to expect some metadiscourse; they feel justifi
ably dislocated if you launch into the subject without explaining what your
credentials are, what the topic is, why it is important, and what your plans
are for the presentation. And, ironically, this is true even when they already
know most of this. To repeat, the audience will not be bored by this "obvi
ous stuff."
Your title sequence should therefore give your presentation an official
name that people can use later when discussing it and will ordinarily iden
tify the client who commissioned it or the group who produced it. You may
wish to explicitly state the purpose of the presentation, or you can combine
that information with the title or agenda segments. The agenda section pro
vides a road map into the presentation, orienting your viewers towards
what they are about to see and hear. The simplest agenda section is a bulleted
list that provides a concise overview of the main parts of the program. These
should almost always be listed in the same order that they occur.
This brings up another pointer for organization: once you've decided
on a certain ordering, be consistent. Don't skip from one topic to another
and back without a very good reason.
198 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TEN

DEVELOPING A THEME

After you've properly oriented the audience, then you can begin to
develop your arguments. Often you will be asked to speak on the solution to a
problem. In this case, you will begin by brainstorming around your own title,
such as How we Can Improve Computer Literacy. Just remember that such a
presentation would invariably involve presenting a vivid picture of the current
problem with communication before suggesting ways to improve it. Again,
state the obvious.
As is so often the case, the simplest way is the best way. You might
organize your presentation around a simple train of thought, such as: "Our
company's use of software is growing. More software means more training.
Outside training is costly. SYBEXBooks deliver good instruction. We should
use SybexBooks for in-house training.''
Another effective way to organize such a presentation would be to
present both sides of an argument and let the audience decide: "We Should
Rely on Sybex Books-Five Reasons. We Should Not Rely on SYBEX
Books-Five Reasons." T his approach can often win over an audience by
virtue of its unusual fairness and completeness.

PUTTING WORDS FIRST

Judging from reviewers' comments in several magazines, some people

are finding Autodesk Animator their first experience with addictive soft
ware. It's easy for users to get so hooked on animation that they concentrate
on illustrations and metaphor and neglect the more literal aspects of their
message, particularly the printed text. But if you're not producing anima
tion for pure entertainment, then you are producing it to teach your audi
ence something, and you should not lose sight of this fact. Printed messages
on the screen should have a high priority in your pedagogy-they can rein
force retention of the spoken word.
T here is a distracting potential in the use of printed words, however.
As explained in the chapter on titling, try to use words as memory-joggers
and emphasizers rather than as sources of information. A notable exception
might be a stunning quotation or a statement of mission, but even here, use
less than 50 words. As a rule of thumb, use fewer than eight words per line,
and use fewer than eight lines of text.
 Designing Effective Presentations 199

TIP
Psychological research has shown that the mind most easily
groups things such as words and concepts in groups of about
seven. With regard to layout, it may help if you think of text as
another kind of graphic element.

OPTIMIZING LAYOUT

A clean, strong layout is essential, as illustrated in Figure 10.4. You will

get good results if you use:

Light, colorful text on dark, uncluttered backgrounds

Generous clear space around words

Figure 10.4: An effective text block

200 . MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TEN

Left-justified text

The largest font sizes available

The bulleted list construction, of which this is an example

Indentation to indicate the hierarchy of concepts

You may also wish to experiment with running heads h ea ders, or foot
,

ers, as found on the pages of this book. If you have enough room for this, it
can sometimes lend an added sense of cohesiveness and elegance.

TIP
Remember: clear space is not wasted space! Don't try to crowd
too much into your screen.

One layout feature you should know about is parallelism. This is a

specialized brand of consistency that applies to items grouped closely
together. Here is an example of faulty parallelism: ''Our main concerns were
isolating the gene, correlate its effects with the stages of metamorphosis,
and demonstrate its presence in the transformed body parts." A better struc
ture would be: "Our main concerns were to isolate the gene, to correlate its
effects with the stages of development, and to demonstrate its presence in
the transformed body parts." An equally acceptable solution would be:
"Our main concerns were isolating the gene, correlating its effects with the
stages of metamorphosis, and demonstrating its presence in the transformed
body parts.'' The first solution rendered all the concerns as infinitives: to
isolate, to correlate, to demonstrate. The second solution rendered them as
gerunds: isolating, correlating, demonstrating. To ensure parallelism, stick
by your original choice of active or passive voice and your choice of past,
present, or future tense.

WARNING
Faulty parallelism is most jarring when exposed by the stark skele
ton of a bulleted list.

Finally, it might be helpful to set aside the left side of your screen for
your left-justified text and keep your principal focus for gr aphics on the
 Designing Effective Presentations 201

right. Or you could develop a layout with graphics in the top of the screen
and text on the bottom.

ILLUSTRATING YOUR IDEAS

For ideas on illustration, you can turn to half the chapters of this book ,
but of course, business presentations have their own graphic language, com
posed of bar charts for general comparisons, pie charts for percentage
shares, plots of statistical trends, organizational flowcharts, and territorial
maps. If you plan to use these features frequently, you should invest in soft
ware designed specifically to generate them. You will find advice in many
references on using this kind of quantitative data effectively. Here are just a
few reminders:

Use no more than four colors on the chart itself

Use lighter and brighter colors for emphasis on just a few note
worthy elements

Restrict bar charts to comparisons of five or fewer subjects; put

only one pie chart on the screen at a time

The thickest and brightest lines in a chart should outline the data;
frame borders rank next; and grid lines, if any, or other details
should be finer and fainter

Label vertical axes with a horizontal title at the top; don't try to
string the text along vertically, forcing the audience to put a crick in
their necks

Grid marks and tic marks (the short place-marking stubs on horizontal
and vertical axes) should be avoided. It is especially important not to "float"
your data without reference to the ground- see Figure 1O.5. In other
words, don't distort data by restricting your vertical axes to the values
between, for example, 60 and 70. That makes changes look disproportion
ately large. For the sake of honesty, you should indicate the zero value as
well, to show how far above zero all the values really are as in Figure 10.6. A
good solution to showing a graph that is unwieldy is to ''tear out the mid
dle." You can then make the remaining high and low values look as if they
were raggedly pasted back together.
202 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TEN

Figure 10. 5: A poor chart

Once you've developed these pin-stripe masterpieces in your favorite

business-presentation package, grab them as PCX files using the screen cap
ture programs discussed in Chapter 12, and convert them into GIF files
using Autodesk Converter. Of cour se , nothing prevents you from develop
ing these images directly in Animator, assuming that you first develop a grid
and use the Grid Snap feature to make sure that the quantitative sizes are
right.
Another way to "illustrate" your ideas, in the looser sense of the
word, is to use concrete examples from real life whenever possible. Anec
dotes, true-life stories, name-dropping opportunities, and references to
well-known staples of entertainment and advertising are all effective ways
to evoke lasting associations. Apply critical discretion, though, and use
them sparingly and only where appropriate. You will be in good company.
IBM, no slouch in innovative advertising, has at various times found it con
venient to use references to Charlie Chaplin and the TV series MA SH.
 Designing Effective Presentations 203

Figure 10.6: An effective chart

You can draw some broad references, too. Rely on simple common sense to
help you avoid the possibilities of copyright infringement, not to mention
giving the impression that you're not creative enough to come up with your
own ideas!
Simple statistics can provide journalistic clout and prove to the audi
ence that you've done your homework-check out the first paragraphs of
this chapter as an example. Just be sure to give your viewers hard numbers,
not sophisticated statistical inferences. I wouldn't throw chi-squares and
non-parametric tests at an audience unless they were a group of card
carrying epidemiologists or actuaries.
The use of testimony is a time-honored convention for clinching a sale,
but it can backfire if the person being quoted is not recognized and
respected by the audience. In such cases, it acts as a red flag for distraction
and skepticism.
204 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TEN

To summarize, your presentation is governed by the same laws of com

munication that govern novels, news broadcasts, and this book, and one of
them is: the charm is in the details. Be specific, and use concrete details.
Given the choice between "visiting Europe" and "standing under the
winged lion that looks down on Venice's Piazza Di San Marco," which
sounds more appealing to you?

WRAPPING UP YOUR PRESENTATION

The final section of your presentation traditionally says, "We began by
promising to put forth several facts, and we hope this presentation has now
convinced you of them." One way to do this is to repeat the bulleted list
originally used to describe your agenda. If your title was, ''Did Mrs. Johnson
Run the Red Light?" your ending segment might be captioned, "No, Mrs.
Johnson Did Not Run the Red Light."
The ending is your last chance to make your point, and fortunately,
this is a time when audience interest is at a natural peak. It is also your
chance to give viewers the feeling that your objectives were met and the
time was well-spent.

PERFECTING YOUR PITCH

Unlike a slide show, animation is a medium that strives to capture

some of the complexity and sparkle of real life, and because it is compelling,
you can use it for stand-alone presentations on a crowded convention floor,
in the foyer of an office building, or from a pedestal in a museum. Practically
all of the pointers given above apply to such presentations.
But on the other hand, you will often use animation as a partner for
your own act. You will be centerstage and the audiovisuals will be your
backdrop. If that's the case, a fine animation, the culmination of two months
of work, deserves a fine performance from the leading lady or leading man,
and this means still more preparation. And yet, you would be astounded to
know how many speakers don't practice before taking the podium.
According to attorney Lee Gould Schiffer, this baffling and ironic tragedy
 Designing Effective Presentations 205

may be due to some combination of the following factors:

People are natural procrastinators.

They are embarrassed to practice by talking to an empty room.

They trivialize the importance of communication because they rate

content too highly over style; they wrongly assume that content
will speak for itself.

If you fall into these traps, brilliant animation can't save your presenta
tions. The moral of this story is: practice makes perfect.

SUMMARY

Well, class, that just about does it for Speech 101. I assure you that I
learned something, too. I think that little of what we have discussed here is
intuitive; it must be learned and re-learned before each new show.
In this chapter, you've seen why finely polishing your presentations is
so important, and we've covered the attributes of good communication.
You know how to use the scant time you will have for the best effect: we've
covered planning, organization, and the fundamental structure of a typical
presentation. You now know how to develop your theme, use printed
words effectively, and design winning layouts. This chapter draws upon a
large body of tradition for effective use of business graphics, and will
encourage you to sharpen your reliance on vivid detail. Finally, it stresses
the need to practice any oral presentation.
You are now close to attaining mastery over Autodesk Animator, but a
few fascinating topics remain. One of the burning mysteries for any anima
tor is how to get those flies onto videotape. You can launch into that topic
whenever you're ready; it begins on the next page.
CHAPTER

ELEVEN

RECORDING
YOUR ANIMATIONS
ON VIDEOTAPE
 A survey commissioned by Autodesk
revealed that practically all Animator users are interested in videotaping
their animations; so in this chapter, we will discuss how you can record your
presentations. In order to do this, you must have a VGA card specifically
designed for video recording or you must purchase an external converter
box, such as the Jovian Logic VIN. In this chapter, we will compare a VCR's
input requirements with the output from a VGA graphics card to help you
understand compatibility requirements. Then we will discuss the numerous
pitfalls of video recording , and I will prepare you for the disappointment
you can expect if you try to record animations with an inexpensive VHS
videocassette recorder. Then I will show you the alternatives to VHS as a
tape format. But the proper way to begin is by putting video communica
tions into a modern context.
Video has a relatively long-lived and honored role in corporate com
munications, having largely displaced its predecessor, the filmstrip. But
video was once the domain solely of big business, the only sector rich
enough to afford it. It has taken many years for it to filter into general use.
Over the past few years, the consumer market for video has made some
striking changes in the growth, as well as the conduct, of corporate video.

UNDERSTANDING
THE POWER OF VIDEO

A sales engineer recently told Industry Week that his company used to
distribute sales information by brochures, ''but video is a new medium
one with real sales power. You know, we can go out and we can tell people
all day long, and we can show them brochures, but when it comes right
down to it, to visually go through the operation is pure gold.' ' His com
pany's first video cost $34,000 and had a running length of thirteen min
utes . He mailed that tape to a prospect on the basis of a routine sales lead,
and harvested more than four million dollars worth of business, "all from a
company that had never seen or heard of us before.'' Not bad for a little tape!
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 209

A programmer for the Federal Election Commission would agree. He

has used video to augment training for users of mainframe software. "The
video can make points that I would overlook,'' he told MIS Week, ''then stu
dents can pin-point issues with follow-up questions." A videotape producer
whose customers include Du Pont told MIS Week reporter Leslie Groff that
"there are a lot of unconscious things that go on when people watch a
video." This includes motivation to use new features of software. And it's
cheaper to mail a video across the continent than to fly out a trainer, espe
cially considering the scheduling problems. Videos enhance understanding
of the training class by giving students a preview, or by refreshing their
memory long after the class is over.
Yes, the use of video is spreading into the most unlikely aspects of com
merce, including the business of crime. "It's something you didn't see five
years ago. But you don't go to a crime scene now without your videotape,"
said the district attorney for Kansas City in a recent Kansas City Star article.
The use of videotape in the courtroom is now so pervasive that it can't be
easily summed up in a few sentences, but one remark by the D.A. is espe
cially compelling: ''Whenever you show videotape, the jurors are always on
the edge of their seats and paying attention.'' Another unusual application
f or video, and in this case, video generated from computer graphics, is land
scaping. "Before people spend thousands of dollars on a landscape idea, we
can show them what it will look like,'' said the owner of a computer graph
ics service bureau in an Atlanta]ournal-Constitution interview. This was a
year bef ore the release of Autodesk Animator Clips, which, like the Georgia
service bureau, provide a library of trees, shrubs, lawns, and flowerbeds.
Eli Lilly, General Motors, and many other companies are using the
video equivalent of a press release, and a Nielsen study found that of 125
news directors at television stations across the nation, 83 percent would
incorporate such video news releases into their news broadcasts. These
video releases are most eagerly accepted by smaller television stations that
aren't able to gather material as easily as large stations. And of course, the
applications for VHS tape as a medium fo r conveying technical information
run the gamut from Tauton Press's Setting Ceramic Tile to a sales pitch/
tutorial on the the popular PerFORM software from Delrina Technologies.
Where is all this heading? Well, even if you don't know it you've
already answered the question. These applications, along with your pur
chase of Autodesk Animator and the required videographics equipment,
suggest that we are presently heading toward what W hole Earth Catalog
editor Stewart Brand calls "the world of the Media Lab and the media lab of
the world."
210 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

As we approach the next millenium, you will see your computer

becoming a common center for processing all kinds of information: text,
statistics, financial data, captured images, CAD designs, audio, and video. To
your computer, all these unique signals are reduced to the same common
denominator: bits and bytes. They can therefore be shuffled at will like a
pack of digital cards. And this information can stream out of your office
again in reconstructed format through modems, fax machinery, laser prints,
or on floppy disks and videotapes.

MAKING THE VIDEO CONNECTION

It is important to understand the difference between an ordinary VGA

card and one that has been designed for videotape recording. Let's begin
with the VGA graphics card you're already using for Animator, and proceed
towards the video side of the connection. Your VGA card delivers an analog
RGB signal to your VGA monitor. You've probably heard that term before;
what does it mean?
RGB stands for red, blue, and green. As explained in Chapter 5, most
natural colors can be simulated by some mixture of red, green, and blue light
(these colors are called the primary colors). Your VGA monitor, like your
television set, is covered with tiny red, green, and blue phosphors that can
be seen only with a magnifying glass.
So you have phosphors that emit light, and you need to tell them how
much light to emit. You can send that information using either a digital or
analog scheme. The old EGA card used a digital method in which each of the
primary colors was represented by two bits of information, yielding four
levels of brightness: 0, 1, 2, and 3. Thus, when the green and blue primaries
were not active, you could have only four levels of red brightness. Clearly,
this digital solution is an unsatisfactory way to reproduce the thousands of
shades of reddish colors distinguishable by the human eye. Yes, you can get
more red shades out of EGA by adding small amounts of blue and green, but
EGA can support only 64 colors maximum, and most of them have all the
warmth and realism of Day-Glo paint, which is highly saturated in color. To
make a long story short, I encourage you to spend ten minutes with an old
EGA paint program-you will never want to give up VGA graphics and Ani
mator again.
An analog video signal is much richer than a digital EGA signal, and a
video camera provides the best example of analog video, as illustrated in
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 211

Figure 11.1. Its analog signal provides a continuous brightness response, in con
trast to the jarring jumps in EGA brightness. A video camera is thus exquisitely
sensitive to the fine shadings of the natural world. Animator's VGA graphics,
strictly speaking, employ a cross between a digital representation and an analog
one. The picture is stored in digital memory but is converted to an analog signal
not much different in some respects from the analog RGB signals used inside
your camcorder and television set. VGA supports 64 levels of brightness in each
of the red, green, and blue primaries, leading to 262, 144 possible colors. This
quantity represents about two-thirds of all shades of color that can be distin
guished under ideal laboratory conditions.
Let's not simply gloss over the differences between VGA output and
VCR input by sweeping them under the rug as "different in some respects."
T he three principal differences are in the speed of the scanning, the interlac
ing of the scan lines, and color encoding. Before I explain them, let's return
to Television 101, couched somewhat in the familiar terminology of the per
sonal computer.

Figure 11.1: Analog versus digital brightness levels

212 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

SCANNING THE IMAGE

A television image is generated by high-energy electrons bombarding

the screen's phosphors. The electron gun begins at the top left of the screen,
sweeps across horizontally, turns off to do "a carriage return" to the left
edge, and traces another line, until it reaches the bottom of the screen. Then
it turns off again, and returns to the ''home'' position to start over. This hap
pens almost exactly 60 times a second. The difference in scanning rates
between VGA and video is simple: VGA scans a single horizontal line in
exactly half the time required by broadcast video (for experts, VGA scans at
about 31KHz, while broadcast television scans at 15.75KHz).

INTERLACING THE IMAGE

Interlacing complicates this picture. (No pun intended.) What I have

yet to mention is that each time the electron gun reaches the bottom of the
screen, it has traced only half the picture: either the odd or the even lines.
Since the odd lines are traced first , and then the even lines, they are said to
be "interlaced" in time and space.
Interlacing is used because the whole picture must be retraced 30 times
a second to satisfy the requirements of the ''persistence of vision'' phenom
enon. If the picture were refreshed less often, it would flicker annoyingly.
On the other hand, if the whole picture were continuously scanned from
top to bottom 30 times a second, there would be nearly one-thirtieth of a
second between the appearance of the top and bottom portions. The result
ing top/bottom flickering would produce headaches, not to mention dis
traction. This difference is too large to be averaged by the persistence of
vision. Therefore, the picture is presented as odd and even fields each last
,

ing one-sixtieth of a second. The completed picture is known as a frame,

hence the term "frame grabber," for a device that digitizes a video image.
This interlacing scheme was present in even the earliest black-and
white models, and admittedly, has done yeoman service for a 1930s-era
solution. But now it is viewed with some dismay. Clearly, we shouldn't be
haunted sixty years later by a television image that can't be inspected too
closely. As author Stewart Brand said, "The TV image seethes like an ant's
nest when y ou get close to it." Then the MIT Media Lab's Advanced Televi
sion researchers showed him a high definition television (HDTV) in which
the whole screen was continuously repainted without interlacing, at a rate
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 213

of sixty frames per second. "When you see the two pictures side-by-side
sixty-frame progressive compared with thirty-frame interlaced-it's like
night and day. You wouldn't believe how much it is shimmering until you
see one that isn't," MIT scientist Andy Lippman told Brand.
Although HDTV broadcasts are not expected for several more years,
some manufacturers today market Improved Definition Television (IDTV)
sets that de-interlace broadcast television signals. They use computer meth
ods to reconstruct the missing information between the interlaced lines. In
this way, they can offer a sixty-frame progressive picture at broadcast TV
resolution (which is equivalent to 330 x 483 pixels). Note that the VGA sig
nal, too, is sixty- frame progressive, as shown in Figure 11.2.

NOTE
T he conversion of analog RGB to a television signal is known as
encoding. Another bit of jargon to know is the popular acronym,
NTSC, which stands for "National Television Standards Commit
tee." All American videotape recorders are designed around a
video signal that meets this standard for timing, interlacing, and
color encoding.

You should be aware that piping your computer-generated analog RGB

image into an NTSC encoder can lead to some serious flickering problems if
the image has thin horizontal lines. This happens whenever a line covers only a
single odd- or even-line of pixels; such a line will be displayed only half the
time, because of interlacing. Fortunately, Animator minimizes this problem
automatically, since its vertical r esolution (200 pixels) is more than twice as
coarse as TV resolution (roughly 480 pixels). Theoretically, horizontal lines in
Animator should not flicker, but in practice they sometimes do.

ENCODING COLOR

You may have already noticed the stark contrast between the fifteen
pin output jack of a VGA card and the single-pin input jack of your VCR.
Clearly, analog RGB transmits a great deal of information in a separated form
that must be mixed together for videotape recording. Analog RGB color sig
nals must be encoded to meet the color broadcast standard. Long ago, the
designers of broadcast TV faced the problem of condensing signals from stu
dio cameras into one signal that could be pulled from an antenna on your
roof, and NTSC video, whether for good or ill, was their so l ution .
214 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

Figure 11.2: A comparison of VGA and NTSC screens in one-sixtieth of a

second

NT SC color encoding was truly an ingenious solution. In studying

NTSC, you will encounter fascinating facts drawn from physics, mathemat
ics, color science, and the nature of human vision, all seamlessly inter
twined in a single technology. Also note that NTSC television and its foreign
cousins PAL and SECAM have utterly captivated the world's viewers for the
past three decades, and may well have precipitated some of the social
upheavals of the 1990s. But a book on Autodesk Animator is not the right
place for a thorough introduction to video engineering; to those of you who
are curious, I invite you to study further on your own.
H owever, we should hit the highlights, because the first thing you need
to know about NTSC video and videotape recording is that it has its problem
side. Yes, NTSC color encoding is ingenious, but it would be more precise to
say that it is an ingenious kludge (kludge is computerspeak for a poorly con
ceived solution); it is riddled with compromises for the sake of compatibil
ity with the black-and-white NTSC standard, established back in the 1930s.
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 215

Color television is basically a black-and-white luminance signal (called

Y for short), with a tacked-on color, or chroma, signal (called C for short).
The chroma signal, in turn, is composed of two elements called I and Q that
carry the warm shades and cool shades, respectively. Thus every pixel on an
NTSC broadcast is colored by a mixture ofY, I, and Q-see Figure 11.3.

Figure 11.3: How RGB is encoded as composite NTSC

ENSURING GOOD
VIDEOTAPE RECORDING

The violet-blue-green Q signal is a coarse, fuzzy signal . The red

orange-yellow-green I signal fills in a bit more detail, and the Y or luminance
signal provides the finest details. Thus very small objects are transmitted as
either colorless or orangish, regardless of what the camera's RGB says (or for
that matter, what your VGA card says) . You've never noticed that before
because these shortcomings were designed prec isely around the limitations
216 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

of color vision. These sacrifices are typical of those made to prevent the
color information from requiring significant new portions of the 1930s
style broadcast channels. I mention this because we are currently seeing a
debate over sacrifices that would have to be made to proposals for high
definition television (HDTV) to make them fit into today's broadcasting
channels.
To repeat, NTSC is an ingenious kludge. It can smear and blur the unnatu
rally strong colors of computer graphics, particularly the reds at the end of the
rainbow. Black, white and grey lack color and will be unchanged, and green is
usually okay, but the other colors can be subjected to varying degrees of bleed
ing or discoloration. There are two solutions to this problem: reduce the satura
tion of problem colors or buy a more expensive VGA-to-video product that
handles color more competently. Even the best products, however, will be
unable to render a perfectly sharp and solid image of a screen composed of vio
lent color contrasts.
Still other problems arise because of conflicts between chroma and
luminance signals. An NTSC broadcast mixes the chroma and luminance sig
nals together so that they can be received together on a single antenna, and
this is called a composite signal. Unfortunately, the two signals overlap
somewhat, and in the process of separating them, color TV invariably dis
cards some of the luminance detail that a black-and-white TV set would
show.
So here you have an abbreviated catalog of the possible picture quality
problems of NTSC color encoding:

Objectionable seething and flickering in the picture

Thin horizontal lines that flicker terribly

Reduced luminance detail

Bleeding of colors

False rainbows in black-and-white checkered patterns

To reduce these problems, you can purchase a VGA-to-video product

that provides an alternative to NTSC encoding, notably Super VHS, which
provides a Y IC connector. By keeping the Y and C signals separate , Super
VHS and other improved tape formats (Betacam SP, U-matic SP, and Hi 8)
reduce some of these picture quality problems. (We will cover VGA-to-video
products and tape formats shortly.) If it's any consolation, carefully scruti
nize the million-dollar animation sequences used by the major TV networks,
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 217

and you will see even there faint traces of the imperfections of the graphics
to-video conversion process, such as crawling edges.
But wait, there's much, much more. I haven't discussed how you can
avoid the pitfalls of videotape recording, editing, and duplicating. Let's look
at some of them now.

ENSURING GOOD VIDEOTAPE EDITING

Simply stated, real-time animation is Animator's biggest asset. By con

structing substantial flies and linking them together seamlessly with an Ani
mator script, you can generate a continuous movie as big as your hard disk
or RAM disk will allow. All you need to do is press your VCR's record button
to start recording, and stop when the flic is over.
That's the ideal. In practice, it isn't as simple. You will usually have to edit
your video sequence. The most likely reasons for this are because you probably
don't have enough hard disk or RAM disk space to hold more than a few min
utes of animation, or because you want to combine animation with a "live"
video sequence. And when you begin to edit video seriously, with the intent of
avoiding glitches and rolls, you will encounter a whole new world of concepts
and machines designed to maintain the continuity of your video signal.
You already know about the chroma and luminance signals that carry
the actual picture information. In addition to these items, composite video
relies on electrical pulses to define the beginning and end of the horizontal
and vertical scanning process. These are called sync pulses, because they
keep the movement of the television's electron gun in sync with the picture
information.
Unfortunately, the tape sp eed inevitably varies during recording and
playback. This means that the pulses, and the color signal as well, can get out
of synchronization. "Sync pulses out of sync" is more than a contradiction
in terms: it can lead to discolored, torn, rolling, jumping video that does not
I look very professional, to say the least. You probably will not run into prob
lems with this on your first pass to videotape. If you can start your Animator

I script and record continuously without stopping, you should be just fine.
But it's very unlikely that you will want to produce only one copy of your

I
production. You might want to distribute several copies of your tape, per
haps a hundred. It's when you begin to edit or duplicate videotape that sync
problems often show up.
The usual answer to sync problems is a time-base corrector (TBC). This
device stores a scan line or two in memory and puts out a corrected version
if the timing of the horizontal or vertical sync pulses goes awry. This gets all
218 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

your sync pulses "back in sync." Some high-end TBCs can acquire an entire
frame and swap in correct frames for defective ones. T he T BC is an essential
part of any professional video studio, because it can rectify common prob
lems with unevenness in videotape speed during recording and playback.
You are not likely to want to buy a TBC, because they're expensive; if you
need this kind of assistance, you should contact your local video post
production studio.
Another related term you will often hear is genlock. Without it, you
can't harmoniously combine video images from two sourct:s. Let's say that
you want to fade from an animated title sequence into a live-action shot (a
fade-in). Or suppose you want to superimpose animation over a live back
ground (:in overlay). Or even more likely, let's say that you want to switch
smoothly from a live actor to an animation (video switching). All of these
techniques require that the two video sources use the same sync timing,
which is possible only if you have a genlock.
If you have a genlock, you will select some reliable master video signal
that will serve as a timing reference for all incoming signals (the so-called
house black). Feed that to the genlock. The genlock will then lock the
chroma and sync pulses of other incoming video signals to that ''beat.'' T his
prevents rolling, smearing, and discoloration, when switching between two
video signals or doing video overlays with a key matte.
In my own experience, a flic of a winking pig produced on Super VHS
for a colleague couldn't be edited on U-Matic tape. It looked great on Super
VHS but jittered and jumped when viewed through the U-Matic deck's out
put. Derek H ardison of Animation Atlanta solved my problem by running
my S-VHS sequence through his Amiga's SuperGen genlock. T his stripped
away the sync pulses and replaced them with one more acceptable to the
U-Matic tape deck. In this situation, a genlock was able to serve as a time
base corrector.

CONVERTING VGA TO VIDEO

T here are now quite a number of manufacturers of VGA-to-video con

version devices. Most of these products take the form of VGA cards with
both a VGA and a VCR jack, and most have roughly equivalent price/
performance characteristics. T herefore, I will mention only a few items that
have some unusual features.
T he Magni Systems VGA Producer card is unusual in that it is a card
that plugs into the IBM PC bus alongside an existing VGA card. Connecting
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 219

the VGA Producer to your VGA card usually requires that the VGA card's
video RAM-DAC chip be removed and replaced by a cable. (However, the
Metheus Premier VGA was designed for use with the Magni card and does
not require removal of the chip.) Other distinguishing features of the Magni
Systems card are its video switching, fading, and overlay features, which
stem from its genlock capability, and its S-VHS output. The Magni Systems
solution, shown in Figure 11.4, is a relatively expensive one, but it's more
flexible and powerful than most competing products. However, manufac
turers are making better products all the time. Two companies to know in
this regard are Vision Technologies and Truevision, which both offer
feature-packed VGA-to-video cards. And you should also be on the lookout
for any new VGA-to-video cards that tap an important breakthrough from
Edsun Laboratories in Waltham, MA: the Continuous Edge Graphics (CEG)
chip. Some people say that this chip, which can blend the VGA's palette of
256 colors into more than 700,000 shades, will signal a quantum leap in the
appearance of VGA graphics.
The Jovian Logic VIN box is noteworthy because it is a small external
box that attaches to the VGA output port of practically any computer,

Figure 11.4: The Magni Systems VGA Producer card

220 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

including a laptop. It delivers a crisp S-VHS picture (as well as composite

NTSC) at a good price, especially if you already have a VGA card, and offers
a high degree of flexibility.
Manufacturers are now beginning to go beyond VGA-to-video strate
gies to provide comprehensive multimedia solutions on a single card. Video
Associates Laboratories sells a card that provides YGA, video, and audio. It
is pictured in Figure 11. 5. And their newest product is a single card that will
digitize video and audio and then play them back.

Figure 11. 5: The VAL Microkey IA card

CHOOSING YOUR GEAR

You may not have a video monitor in your office, if your employer is
concerned about people watching Days of Our Lives when they should be
bringing in revenue. And you may not need one, if you're restricting your
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 221

use ofAnimator to small, in-house presentations, or some kind of booth dis

play. But if you are working with videotape or video teleconferencing, you
should consider having a versatile monitor that accepts both VGA and tele
vision input. Most of these are large-screen monitors with large-scale price
tags, but the 13-inch Mitsubishi Diamond Scan AUM 138 lA and Thomson
Ultrascan 4375M monitors are multi-scanning monitors that accept both
VGA and NTSC signals. They also accept Macintosh video and the digital
RGB of an EGA card .
Imagine a portable projector TV not much bigger than a breadbox that
projects the brilliant beam of a H igh Intensity Discharge lamp through a
color LCD panel ( you don't have to imagine it, there is one shown in Figure
11.6). You can place it on any tabletop and displJy the picture on a reflective
screen . Sharp makes such a product, and it is rapidly gaining popularity for
corporate presentations. Many futurists are still waiting for picture-frame
TV panels that can hang on a wall, but personally, I prefer the greater flexi
bility of the Sharp solution, and it's a proven, affordable technology for cor
porations with about $3300 to spend on presentation hardware.

Figure 11.6: One of the LCD video projectors from Sharp

222 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHOOSING A VIDEOTAPE FORMAT

Your idea of videotape recording is almost certainly dominated by
your experience with home VHS recorders, of which there must be hun
dreds of thousands; they are now as much a standard home appliance as an
electric can opener. Many purchasers of Autodesk Animator probably think
that all they need to do to videotape their flies is buy a VGA-to-video card
and hook it up to a $300 home VCR. Unfortunately, doing this is sure to dis
appoint you. One of the primary goals of this chapter is to help you under
stand why.
The Video Home Systems (VHS) videotape format invented by JVC is
okay for acquiring footage of Tommy's fourth birthday, but VHS videotape
suffers from severe generational loss. Generational loss is an extremely
important concept in videography. It may remind you of the law of physics
that says some energy is always wasted as heat whenever useful work is
done. It's impossible to dub (that is, copy) a videotape without some loss of
picture quality. Now, that may sound like the remark of a perfectionist, but I
assure you, this is no trivial matter. The generational loss between original
VHS footage and the ("second generation") copy is pronounced, and the
quality of the third generation is simply awful. You will run into this road
block whenever you try to do any reasonable level of videotape editing,
since several generations of video duplication are involved when you move
beyond the simplest editing.
Today, there are many different videotape formats that offer an alterna
tive to VHS, and they suffer from various degrees of generational loss. The
high-end videotape formats used by broadcasters suffer scant generational
loss. In addition, U-Matic and Beta equipment, particularly the new Superior
Performance (SP) lines, allow you to go well beyond the third generation
while maintaining a reasonably clear picture. This assumes that the equip
ment is used properly and equipment such as a time-base corrector is used.
At this moment, corporate video is still dominated by two aging and
relatively expensive Sony product lines: the 3/4-inch tape format known as
"three-quarter" or U-Matic, and the 1/2-inch tape format known as "half
inch" or Beta, Betamax, or Betacam (not to be confused with Sony's obso
lete home Betamax products, which are related by name only). The
U-Matic/Beta choice has been practically the only one for corporate com
munications since the 1970s, but now, Sony's monopoly is being challenged
by other companies with other videotape formats.
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 223

Sony's industrial video products are admirably rugged, versatile, and

well-designed. For these reasons, they have proven cost-effective for pro
fessionals. To make another long story short, since Beta and U-Matic bypass
NTSC color encoding and use their own encoding methods, they subject
video to less generational loss. For this and other reasons, video profession
als have traditionally been willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for
Sony cameras and VCRs, when they could have picked up consumer VHS
equipment for considerably less.
But this picture is changing. Once a manufacturer has spent several
million dollars on development, product design, and tooling for a new
product, it can make a profit either by selling a few of the items at very high
cost, or thousands of them at a low cost. More and more, companies such as
JVC, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Mitsubishi are aiming for the''prosumer'' mar
ket. Prosumer video is a populous Twilight Zone between absurd and sub
lime applications ranging from Melinda's baby shower to describing the
three-dimensional structure of the cerebral cortex.
The equipment for prosumers covers a broad price and sophistication
range, and the traditional distinctions between the professional and the hob
byist are eroding. "Professional video is getting cheaper and easier to use,"
says Videographer commentator John Rice, "while consumer equipment is
getting better and entering the hands of more people .. .it is being shown,
and sold, to the professional, the semi-professional, and the amateur.''
One magazine, Corporate Video Decisions, commissioned a survey of
trends in corporate communications that revealed a surprising market for
low-end VHS equipment. Apparently some companies that want the proven
benefits of video are purchasing consumer equipment, in niany cases with
out much regard for the industry's t radit ional standards of picture quality.
VHS, as you know from your trips to the video rental store, is an acceptable
medium for distribution, but as I explained above, generational loss makes it
a poor choice for video post-production ( editing). Comfortable with their

home VHS units, these newcomers either naively or deliberately try to do as

much of their production and post-production in VHS anyway. Established
videographers who would never consider VHS are hearing from these
upstarts that some audiences don't expect any better quality, despite
smeared-out color and graininess.
Super VHS (S-VHS) is being offered as the solution to all this. In the per
spective of the traditional prices for industrial video equipment, lower-end
S-VHS gear is dirt cheap but delivers fine results. It works happily alongside
regular VHS, since an S-VHS deck can play and record in VHS mode . In
S-VHS mode, like U-Matic and Beta, it avoids a composite NTSC signal, keep
ing the chroma and luminance separate throughout the recording/playback
224 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

cycle, yeilding much finer luminance detail. T he color fidelity in S-VHS is

slightly inferior to Beta and U-Matic, but it triumphs in horizontal detail,
supporting over 400 lines of horizontal resolution. Refer to the following
table for typical values of picture resolution supported by these formats:

TYPICAL
HORIZONTAL
MEDIUM RESOLUTION

VHS 240 lines

Beta and U-Matic 250 lines

Broadcast T V 330 lines

Beta and U-Matic SP 340 lines

S-VHS 400 lines

H i-8 400 lines

ED-Beta 500 lines

S-VHS, which enjoys full downward compatibility with the ubiquitous

VHS format, was once a hot topic in consumer video magazines, because it can
theoretically deliver better-than-broadcast pictures. But as a consumer format,
it has been a failure. Those consumers who do understand the technical super
iority of S-VHS don't seem to be willing to pay the cost difference, even though
sale prices of S- VHS equipment sometimes overlap the prices of better VHS
equipment. In a classic "catch-22," few S-VHS pre-recorded movies are avail
able because the market share is small, and the market share remains small
because few S-VHS movies are available. On the other hand, S-VHS has cap
tured the attention of corporate videographers, especially a younger set that
never developed a reflex to turn to Sony for all solutions.
Other videotape formats worth mention are Mil ("m-two"), ED-Beta,
and Hi-8. Mil is a new industrial video product line from JVC that offers
remarkable price/performance qualities; it also works well in conjunction
with S- VHS equipment. ED-Beta is Sony's new format for the sports market
and wealthy prosumers; at 500 + lines, it boasts the highest picture resolu
tion of any of the formats mentioned, but it is incompatible with practically
everything and has scarcely penetrated the market. Hi-8 is a high-quality
version of the popular 8mm tape format for miniature camcorders; some tel
evision stations have been experimenting with it for news gathering.
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 225

NOTE
In case you're curious, your author purchased a prosumer S-VHS
VCR, the Mitsubishi HS-USO. It would take more room than I have
allotted to describe all the useful features on a deck like this one,
but the most notable are the features that facilitate professional
level editing, which include: high-resolution digital frame cap
ture; variable forward and reverse slow-motion, controlled by a
jog-shuttle dial; high-speed addr ess / in d ex search.

TIP
If you're serious about animation, get an S-VHS or Hi-8 VCR that
has a flying erase head to make clean edits, and a jog-shuttle dial to
provide fine control over your position on the tape. Some sort of
addressing and indexing method to locate video segments is also
extremely valuable.

Video technology is another rapidly changing area full of surprises,

such as the NEC PC-VCR, shown in Figure 11. 7. This is an S-VHS deck with a
built-in serial port, ready to be connected directly to your computer. It is
capable of single-frame recording and playback. Because of its ability to
access stills or sequences all over the tape with scant delay, this product is
expected to define a new market for interactive video, and will be of interest
to lawyers storing depositions, surgeons taping ultrasound scans, sports
action analysis, and so on. The price is about $2000. That's less than a
Diaquest single-frame controller card for your PC, which expects to be con
nected to an industrial VCR costing more than $5000.

TIP
Kevin Krell of Computer Support Associates has informed me that
the NEC PC-VCR cannot do insert edits, the kind of editing used
for single-frame animation. And Gary Yost, the director of devel
opment for Autodesk's 30 Studio , has advised professional anima
tors to avoid videotape altogether when recording animations
one frame at a time. In a note on CompuServe, he strongly recom
mended renting or purchasing a videodisc recorder, concluding:
"As far as I can see, for someone who is putting together a video
production facility, there's NO OTHER SANE CHOICE."
226 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

That concludes our look at videotape recording of Animator's output;

let's press on to the issue of getting video images into Animator; using video
cameras, still video, and frame grabbers.

Figure 11. 7: The NEC PC-VCR

 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 227

USING ELECTRONIC
STILL PHOTOGRAPHY

At first, it looks and acts like a 35mm film camera: you hold it to your
eye, check the light level and autofocus, and snap the flash. But after that,
the similarity ends. There's no film roll to mail to a developing lab. Rather,
you connect the camera to your television set and play back the images,
which are stored in analog form on a 2" floppy disk. There's your picture;
call it what you will-electronic still photography (ESP) or still video. A
solution in search of a problem. The fax equivalent for multimedia comput
ing. It's been called all of these things in the press.
Still video is like fax in some ways. Like fax, it was once affordable
only for wealthy corporations, but now, you can buy a Canon Xapshot or
Sony Mavica still video camera from the same department store that sells
home fax machines. The Xapshot will snap three pictures per second, and
the Mavica can snap nine pictures per second, allowing you to capture a
coarse time-elapse sequence. This can be loaded one frame at a time into
your computer's frame grabber card, if you have one, and eventually
imported into Autodesk Animator.
Note that these cameras are not digital video products, since the 2" floppy
disks, like videotape, record the analog video signal directly. According to
Panasonic, which is marketing its high-quality still video equipment to busi
nesses rather than to consumers, the obvious advantages of still video are:

Compact storage of pictures (up to 50 per disk)

Easy access to specific images (especially compared to videotape)

Reusable medium (try reusing film!)

User-friendly

Consider what Panasonic means by ''user-friendly.'' Which would you

rather take on an assignment to shoot a steel mill: a 30lb, $37,000 Betacam
recorder bristling with gadgets, meters, and switches, or a hand-held, $700
snapshot camera? Newspaper journalists, real estate agents, and the US
Army have been important clients for this technology.
The downside to consumer still video, low vertical resolution, is sel
dom mentioned. Again, like fax, you trade speed and convenience for image
quality. These cameras capture considerably less than half of the 483 lines
that are recorded by similarly priced handheld VHS camcorders, and the
228 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

pictures can be disappointingly pixellated when you're searching for detail.

While it's true that Animator images use less than half the vertical resolution
of broadcast T V, it is also true that Autodesk Converter will give you a
sharper picture from a VHS image than from one of these still video images.

GRABBING IMAGES FROM VIDEO

Still video and camcorders allow you to import realistic images into
Animator presentations, but in themselves, they aren't enough. Once you
have an analog signal that can be viewed on a television monitor, you must
still tranlate it into a digital form your computer can store and manipulate.
T hat's what a frame grabber is for: it digitizes the video signal. T he better
frame grabbers will accept either a composite NTSC signal from an ordinary
camcorder or the raw, analog RGB signal provided by high-resolution cam
eras designed specifically for the Targa, such as JVC's analog RGB cameras.
T he standard by which all frame grabbers are judged is the popular
Targa 16 card from Truevision, which plugs into an IBM AT bus and captures
the image at 16 bits per pixel, providing a palette of 32,768 colors. Many
companies now have products that are comparable to this. All Targa-like
frame grabbers store images in a Targa-compatible format-for instance, the
Vision Technologies Vision 16 and the Matrox Illuminator cards. T he picture
quality in an original Targa file ranges from excellent to astonishing, but
after being crunched down to an Animator-ready GIF file by Autodesk Con
verter, images become somewhat grainy.
Most users should have a dealer install and configure these devices. It is
quite possible for "fights" to break out between your frame grabber and
your computer's existing expansion cards, and judging from the Vision 16,
the documentation can be quite poorly organized, incomplete, and abys
mally vague in helping resolve such subtle and complex problems. With the
exception of the original Targa, these cards usually come with paint pro
grams that often include the actual frame-grabber software. T he latest tech
nology in frame grabbers is found in the Targa+ series, which incorporates
genlocking, overlay, and numerous other extremely impressive and profes
sional features-see Figure 11.8.
Other kinds of frame grabbers generally trade performance for cost.
T he Jovian Logic VIA card is less expensive than the Targa clones, and cap
tures single fields at a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels. Like VGA, it can dis
play 256 colors. I BM has entered this ma rket with its Audio Visual
Connector (AVC) line. Digital Vision sells an inexpensive product called
 Recording Your Animations on Videotape 229

Figure 11.8: T he Truevision Targa+ frame grabber

Computer Eyes that can provide satisfactory results under certain circum
stances. With these products , however, you will spend considerable time
trying to achieve good results within their limitations, and you may not
always be able to get the effect you want.

SUMMARY

T his chapter explains the importance of video communications, and

provides a comprehensive introduction to the practical aspects of NTSC
video. In this chapter, you learned about the problems of NTSC scanline
interlacing and color encoding, and we've discussed how various videotape
formats provide alternatives to NTSC color encoding. You are now aware of

some of the potential problems in video editing, including generational loss,

230 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER ELEVEN

which is a severe problem for VHS videotape. You are also aware of some of
the terminology for the equipment that post-production houses use to fix
video problems, such as time-base correctors and genlocks.
In this chapter, we've covered VGA-to-video products, video monitors
and projectors, VCRs, still video, and frame grabbers. T his is easily the most
complete guide to video in any reference on Autodesk Animator to date, and
I hope it will guide you in making wise decisions about equipment pur
chases and the distribution of your animations. For answers to your inevita
ble, numerous, and doubtless complex questions, your best bet would be to
join a group such as the National Computer Graphics Association (NCGA),
the Association f or Multi-Image (AMI), or the International Television Asso
ciation (ITVA), which is composed of corporate video professionals. In the
next chapter, you will learn how to get your illustrations out of your com
puter and onto paper.
CHAPTER

TWELVE

CAPTURING
AND PRINTING
GRAPHICS
 When it comes to drawing, often you
will hear someone remark, "But I can't even draw a straight line." The
proper answer to that refrain is that a lack of skill in drawing and rendering
never stopped some of the most accomplished photographers and video
graphers from creating some very illuminating and moving photographs,
motion pictures, and videos. These were people who pursued their visions
in spite of conventional artistic constraints; their insight was to pass much
of the work of producing the picture to their servant, the camera.
Animator gives you precisely the same freedom. You can produce stun
ning animated presentations without ever drawing a single straight line.
Capture the images you need from other sources: videotaped sequences,
still-video equipment, scanned-in images, or graphics screens captured with
other software. Import them into Animator using the Converter program.
Then, bring them to life with the magic of animation. In this chapter, we will
discuss the issues of screen capture using commerical and shareware pro
grams and also look at a sample session with Converter. But first, the answer
to the inevitable question: how can you print a picture developed in
Animator?

GETTING YOUR IMAGES ON PAPER

Bef o re, after, or during a presentation, you may want to provide the
audience with a literal''take-home message'': a striking graphic printout. Or
perhaps you will need to provide special clients with attractive, full-color
storyboards bef o re committing to a major animation project. Perhaps you
need a promotional poster for an upcoming presentation. If you're willing
to work around certain limitations of image quality, color fidelity, and pic
ture resolution, it's feasible to get your visions down on paper. In this chap
ter, we will look at the requisite hardware and software. Since Animator
does not provide a printer-output facility, and since the most common
printers are not suitable for high-resolution, full-color images, I thought
some readers might benefit from a little friendly guidance.
 Capturing and Printing Graphics 235

Printers , like 1960s-era television sets, are divided into two camps: black
and-white or color. Before you encountered Animator, you almost certainly
already had plenty of contact with graphics on your company's black-and
white ink-jet or laser printer. Experience with color printing is less common.
Improvements in output quality and reliability, not to mention lower price tags,
have only recently allowed color printers to make any significant penetration
into the marketplace . By the year 2000, though, black-and-white printers will
probably be as rare as black-and-white TV sets are now .

USING BLACK-AND-WHITE PRINTERS

You can often use the same image capture s9ftware whether your goal
is to make black-and-white or color printouts . We will discuss these soft
ware solutions later, but let's talk about hardware first. Using a black-and
white printer for presentation handouts has the following advantages:

1. Very likely, you already have access to a black-and-white graphics

printer, either an ink-jet or a laser printer.

2. If you need to purchase a new printer for presentation handouts

and desktop publishing, a color printer will cost you far more than
a black-andwhite printer (exception: the HP PaintJet, which costs
roughly the same as a laser printer).

3. Black-and-white images can be reproduced more cheaply, usually

with more reliable fidelity, than color images.

4. Black-and-white images can be readily incorporated into desktop

publishing; furthermore , a black-and-white PCX file can even be
directly transmitted and received by fax cards that plug into a PC
compatible computer.

However, there are two major drawbacks to black-and-white printers

for Animator hardcopy:

1. Black-and-white rarely has the impact of color.

2. An effort to reduce a color image to black-and-white can, because

of insufficient contrast , render the image unrecognizable.
236 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWELVE

Therefore, if you intend to supplement an Animator presentation with

black-and-white handouts, you will be faced with such alternatives as the
following:

1. Producing the presentation in monochrome color-for instance,

completely in shades of yellows, golds, and browns. (Fortunately,
this can be surprisingly elegant, and having one distinctive palette
helps enforce a sense of consistency in the presentation.)

2. Producing the presentation initially in full color, and using the

Grays Only option of the Flic or Effects menu to develop a black
and-white version of it. You will be able to see quite clearly how the
screens look in black-and-white with this method, and can adjust
the grey values with the palette tools.

3. Subjecting your full-color screen captures to a great deal of trial

and-error experimentation by varying the settings in your screen
printing software. (Not recommended!)

USING COLOR PRINTERS

The advantages and disadvantages of color printers are the mirror

image of black-and-white printers: they are, as a class, more expensive,
more complex, and less predictable, but those drawbacks are counter
balanced with the fact that they can force your audience to sit up and pay
attention.
There are six color-printing technologies: pen and electrostatic plot
ters, thermal-transfer, ink-jet, dot-matrix, and electrophotographic
( "laser") printers. Although there are some interesting developments on the
horizon with color laser printers, ink-jet and thermal transfer printing are
the only methods within reach for most of us in the forseeable future. The
most popular color ink-jets are models from Hewlett Packard and Tektronix;
among thermal transfer printers, Mitsubishi and Shinko printers have been
relatively popular.
Like an RGB monitor, a color printer uses varying mixtures of three
colors to simulate the true colors of objects, but in printing, cyan, magenta,
and yellow (CMY) are used instead of red, green, and blue. The difference
arises because a monitor emits light, while a printed page absorbs and
reflects light, and is thus governed by different laws of optical color mixing.
The CMY principle is the basis of all color printing. In practice, printers add
 Capturing and Printing Graphics 237

shades of black to boost the contrast. If you use a magnifying glass to exam
ine an example of four-color printing, such as a cereal box, you will see how
the palette of colors is created. The relative size of cyan, magenta, yellow,
and black speckles is varied; the process is called dithering (an Animator
term you've already encountered). If the dither pattern is a square two pix
els tall by two pixels wide, you can generate 125 colors.

NOTE
Cyan is blue-green, and magenta is purple-red.

For the curious, here's how to make 125 colors using three primaries .
The print head can vary the saturation of one dithered patch by leaving no
ink or by printing ink in any of the four pixels. Thus you can have five con
centrations each of cyan, magenta, and yellow. Since you can mix the three
components, this leads to 5 x 5 x 5, or 125 colors. By adding black dither
ing, you can make even more colors.
The thermal transfer printers take a "hot-headed" approach. They
apply a heated head to a ribbon containing a waxy, crayon-like pigment. The
melted wax droplets adhere to the paper. The chief disadvantage of this
method is that it requires multiple passes over the paper to lay down the
component colors. This introduces the serious problem of keeping the page
exactly registered through each pass. Because of the need for high precision,
most good thermal printers are fairly expensive. But with that price, you get
vivid colors and a broad palette. Panasonic, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sharp,
Sony, Kodak, and Canon all offer thermal transfer printers that make prints
of captured video images, but most of these aren't computer-compatible
and don't allow you to print text.
The ink-jet printer is the only type of printer that can print color in a
single pass. This has profound implications on the simplicity of design and
cost-effectiveness of this technology. The ink-jet's head contains nozzles
with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black reservoirs; it mixes colors before
depositing them on the paper. The drawback to the ink-jet is the cost of spe
cially designed paper and the ink cartridges themselves. These printers need
specially formulated paper to absorb and spread just the right amount of
deposited ink, and the ink cartridges are available only from the printer's
manufacturer.
Because of its relatively low price (about $1000), the HP Paint]et, pic
tured in Figure 12 .1, has become the most popular color printer. This
printer can print 330 colors at 90 dots per inch (dpi), which is not nearly so
238 MASTERING.ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWELVE

coarse-looking as you might expect, given your experience with 300 dpi
laser printers. That's because of the favorable tradeoff between shading abil
ity and resolution. The total resolution across a whole page is 1440 dots
(compare to Animator's 320 pixels), and the total number of dots along a
ream of paper is limited only by the fact that sooner or later, the ink runs out.

Figure 12 .1: The HP Paint]et and Paint] et XL

Harvard astrophysicist A.G.W. Cameron recently pitted the PaintJet

against the much higher-priced Howtek Pixelmaster, QMS Colorscript
Model 30, and Tektronix 4936DX . "I used each printer to output the same
color Postscript file," he wrote in Personal Workstation Magazine (March
1990, p. 75), concluding that "there was little difference . . .in color or defi
nition." Even though the Pixelmaster had better fill and resolution than the
Paint]et, he felt that it was " ... not better by nearly $7000." Admittedly,
Cameron's test may not have been a fair one: his image did not contain real
istic figures and subtle colorings. But in its May 31, 1988 color printer evalu
ation, PC Magazine reached essentially the same conclusion. "Overall," the
 Capturing and Printing Graphics 239

editors wrote, "it may be the best bargain in a top-quality color printer."
They also mentioned that this is one of the few color printers that can be
used for printing ordinary text. This is a real advantage for multi-media
applications such as presentations. One drawback of ink-jet prints, how
ever, is that the colors are somewhat washed-out when compared to thermal
prints.
Experts on winning presentation strategies tell us that hand-outs are a
good way to ensure that your audience retains your message. You will find
many uses for instant color hardcopies of Animator images, both on paper
and on overhead-projector transparencies, once you purchase a color
printer. (For instance, printing color labels for your own videotape cas
settes.) But don't go into it without considering the significant operating
costs. Also, be aware that the quality of the output depends not only on the
color possibilities in the printer, but on what the color-printing software can
coax from it. That important topic is coming up next.

EXCHANGING IMAGES
WITH OTHER SOFTWARE

Architects, artists, editors, engineers, musicians, physicians, sales rep

resentatives, scientists, teachers, trainers, and video producers are just a few
of the professionals dedicated to the propagation of ideas. They will no
doubt be interested in exchanging images back and f orth between Animator
and several other kinds of software, such as those mentioned in Table 12. 1.

Table 12 .1: Typical Application Software for Multi-media.

IMPORTS EXPORTS
APPLICATION EXAMPLES GIF? PCX?

Animator Yes No
Raster- or Corel Draw No Yes
vector-based
illustration
Computer-aided AutoCAD No No
design
Desktop publishing PageMaker No No
240 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWELVE

Tuble 12 .1: Typical Application Software for Multi-media (continued).

IMPORTS EXPORTS
APPLICATION EXAMPLES GIF? PCX?

VenturaPublisher No No
Word5.0 No No
WordPerfect 5.0 No No

Presentation Harvard No Yes

graphics Graphics
Applause II Yes No
Freelance+ No No
Hypertext Ask* Me 2000 t No
environments
IconAuthor t Yes

Sources: Personal Computing, Feb. 1990, p. 125 and pp. 140-144; the
Pizzaz Plus manual.
t Imports flies

As this table indicates , Animator's GIF file format is seldom recognized

by other software. The most popular file formats for graphics exchange are
the PCX and black-and-white TIFF formats (TIFF_Color, known as TIFF
Class P, is not yet widely used). Since Autodesk Converter and many other
graphics programs can accept PCX for import, the most obvious solution to
the problem of file incompatibility is a screen-capture utility that can lurk in
the background while you load the image in your application program, and
then take a "snapshot" of the screen in PCX or TIFF format.

WARNING
The technical term for lurking in the background is "Terminate
and Stay Resident," usually shortened to TSR. You should be
aware that TSRs could cause Animator to lock up and therefore
should be used with caution.

In many cases, as indicated by the table above, there is no straightfor

ward way "to get there from h ere " when importing images, but the
 Capturing and Printing Graphics 241

brute-force screen-capture technique sidesteps the whole troublesome issue

of translating an odd export format .
Some of the most widely used graphics format-translator programs are
listed below; not all of them, however, provide pop-up screen capture while
i n another application program. Check with your dealer or with the
manufacturer.

SOFTWARE SUPPLIER

T he Graphics Link Plus HSC Software

1661 Lincoln Boulevard, Suite 101
Santa Monica, CA 90404
(213) 392-8441

HSC ImageTools (for TGA files) (See above)

PHIPS Terravision BBS

Athens, GA 30605
(404) 353-1694 1200 baud, N, 8 , 1

Pizazz Plus Application Techniques

10 Lomar Park Drive, #2
Pepperell, MA 01463
(508) 433-8464

Hi]aak/Inset Inset Systems, Inc.

71 Commerce Drive
Brookfield, CT 06804
(203) 775-5866

GraPlus Jewell Technologies, Inc.

4740 44th Avenue SW, Suite 203
Seattle, WA 98116
(206) 937-1081

VPIC (shareware) Bob Montgomery

13 2 Parsons Road
Longwood, FL 32779

PICEM (freeware) John Bridges

CompuServe ID: 73307 ,606

PICLAB (freeware) T he Stone Soup Group

CompuServe Computer Art
(COMART) Forum
242 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWELVE

TIP
Before purchasing screen-capture software, make sure that it sup
ports the VGA-graphics mode of your graphics software; in the
case of Animator, this is the 320 x 200 pixel-resolution mode with
256 colors.

How do you capture Animator screens for output to a printer or trans

fer to a desktop publishing program? Let's take a Pizazz Plus session as an
example. You must load the Pizazz Plus TSR driver before loading and run
ning Animator. To capture a screen and send it to a disk file or to the printer,
press the Shift and Print-Screen keys simultaneously. T his keystroke is the
so-called "hot key" that suspends Animator and activates Pizazz Plus. After
manipulating and printing the Animator screen, using various options on
the Pizazz Plus menus, you can leave Pizazz Plus and return to work with
Animator.
Sometimes software conflicts between screen-capture programs and
applications such as Animator can cause the computer to lock up. T his was a
problem, f or instance, with early versions of Pizzaz Plus, but it seems to
have been fixed. Technical-support personnel at Application Techniques
advise paying attention to how your mouse driver is loaded if you have diffi
culties with Pizazz Plus locking the machine. In some cases, switching
between the .COM and .SYS versions of the mouse device driver provides
relief. I have also found that Pizazz Plus locks up badly when trying to save
an Animator screen in a format suitable for Microsoft Word (an .IMG file) or
WordPerfect (a special kind of TIFF file). In this book, for example, we have
used the straight TIFF format.

USING SOFTWARE
FOR COLOR PRINTERS

W ith Pizazz Plus, you will not have any problem getting an Animator
image to an HP PaintJet in full color, although you may want to adjust the
height of the image. Printing is almost as simple as pressing the P key. You
might, however, be dismayed to find some unpredictability in the color ren
dition. Blue may become purple and pale green may become kelly-green,
while at the same time, other colors in the same image may print out very
well (fortunately, the colors that reproduce well include flesh tones and
earth tones). My advice is not to spend too many hours fiddling with the
 Capturing and Printing Graphics 243

array of color controls provided by Pizazz Plus, because, as of Version 1.3,

they act on the entire palette, not on selected colors; thus, you can correct
an odd color only at the expense of altering others .
PaintJet users can turn to CompuServe to find a public-domain pro
gram called "PGIF," written by Lee Crocker (user ID: 73407,2030), which
prints GIF files exclusively on the HP PaintJet.

TIP
PGIF is often used at Autodesk. You can find it by typing GO
GRAPHICS once in CompuServe, then using the Graphics File
Finder to locate it. Try using "paintjet" as the keyword for your
search.

If you should download PGIF, you may have difficulty making it work as
documented. T he command line format to actually print the picture file
mypic.gif is:

pgif mypic.gif /dev/prn

You can also use PGIF to convert a GIF file into one containing com
mands for the PaintJet , and then use the DOS COPY command, with its
binary option, to send that file (let's suppose it's named "output") to the
printer, as follows:

pgif mypic.gif output

copy output prn: /b

Oddly, PGIF has problems with inconsistent color fidelity just as Pizazz
Plus does , but the image quality is just as good, and the price is unbeatable
(free). T he PGIF program is one of many printer programs in CompuServe's
Graphics Support Forum. If you have another type of color printer, perhaps
you can find support for it there.

IMPORTING
HIGH-RESOLUTION VGA IMAGES

Are you interested in animating a bar graph, a pie chart, or some other
image developed with special software? Then check out Laurence and
244 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWELVE

Marvin Gozum's GIF-based screen capture program VGACAP, available from

the Graphics Support Forum on CompuServe. This TSR can capture screens
from high-resolution CAD and paint programs (for instance, 640 x 480
modes that use 256 colors). It provides output exclusively in the form of a
GIF file. When you are working with Animator, of course, this restriction is
no restriction at all. When I tested the program, it worked pretty much as
advertised, and I would recommend it . Be advised that there are plenty of
other fine shareware graphics products out there.

NOTE
Under the shareware concept, software that you download and
actually use should be paid for by registering with the authors.
That way, these programmers can continue to supply software
solutions at low prices.

IMPORTING PHOTOGRAPHS

Corporate graphics departments often rely upon an extensive library

of promotional or technical photography gathered over the years. At first
glance, such a gold-mine of images may seem to be of little use to the com
puter animator, since there isn't any slot on a computer marked "insert
photo here." In reality, because of the superior image quality of photo
graphic film, photographs can yeild the highest image quality possible for
your productions, but you must make special arrangements to import them
into your computer. This means either purchasing a black-and-white or
color scanner, or finding a service bureau that can take your photographic
image and scan it onto a floppy disk.
Your applications are likely to involve:

Line art or black-and-white photos

Color photos

Color slides

Here again, as you have already seen many times, there is a clear dis
tinction between the established, low-cost world of black-and-white and
the emerging frontier of color. Your least expensive alternative is one of the
ubiquitous hand-held black-and-white scanners. For less than $200, you can
 Capturing and Printing Graphics 245

give your corporate media lab the capacity to import some interesting
though rough black-and-white pictures in PCX format. These pictures are
also a breeze to tint a la Andy Warhol, and can theref ore be the starting point
for as much color as you want. But as usual, the tradeoff is between low cap
ital cost and greater labor cost!
The solutions to scanning color photos and color slides are two very
different animals. To scan a color photo, use a flatbed scanner such as the
ScanMaster II from Howtek (priced at about $8000) or the JX-100 from
Sharp (about $1000). To scan a color slide, use a slide scanner such as the
Barneyscan slide scanner ($8700) from Barneyscan or the ScanMaster/35
($8000) from Howtek . Flatbed scanners provide the most flexibility. They
allow you to place thick books on the glass surface, as you would on a
photocopier.
Are these solutions appropriate for a small animation production
house? Usually the answer is "no," since they take an overkill approach.
During scanning, these devices collect far more picture detail than Animator
can use. They can hog the following resources: time (a scan at 200 dpi can
take more than 30 minutes), RAM memory, and disk space-not to mention
money. For a fraction of the cost of the ScanMaster II, you can buy a frame
grabber and mount a Super-VHS camera on a copy stand. For the occasional
color scan, it makes sense to find a service bureau that can make them f or
you. On the other hand, if you expect to be working with color photos fairly
often, the relatively low cost of the SharpJX-100 is worth knowing about.
Here is a listing of the resources I mentioned above:

PRODUCT CONTACT

Barneyscan Barneyscan
1198 10th Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
(415) 521-3388
ScanMaster II Howtek, Inc.
ScanMaster/35 21 Park Anenue
Hudson, NH 03055
(603) 882-5200
Sharp Scanners Sharp Electronics Corporation
Sharp Plaza
Mahwah, NJ 07430
(201) 529-8200
246 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWELVE

USING CONVERTER

Now we've covered all the angles of Animator file exchange except for
one: how to actually convert foreign picture-file formats into a 256-color
GIF format suitable for Animator. You might divide the uses of Converter
into two camps: the easy and common uses, and the advanced and uncom
mon uses. The advanced and uncommon features will have to wait for
another book . They include:

Using Converter to generate an animation by scrolling through a

large, high resolution image (the Slide option of the Converter
menu)

Converting still images from other computer formats, such as those

used on Amiga, Atari, and Macintosh computers

Converting animations from Amiga and Atari application formats

That leaves the workhorse functions of Converter: converting GIF,

PCX, and Targa files to Animator's GIF format. Converter is pictured in Fig
ure 12.2. Let's assume you have a colorful high-resolution file ready for
translation by Converter. W hen you change to the directory containing
Converter (usually, c: \aa) and enter convert, the Converter screen
appears, and its menu selector bar reads:

CONVERTER FLIC PIC

Choose the Pie menu, and the options shown in Figure 12.3 appear.
The Pie menu contains options for loading Targa, Amiga, ST, Macin
tosh, PCX, and GIF files. It also has an option for saving the converted file as
a GIF file.
Other important setting controls are found in the Converter main
menu: notably, Scale and Move as shown in Figure 12.4.
Here is a general plan for loading and converting a picture.

I. Select the option that loads your file type . T he image will appear,
but it may be different from the original image in one or more of
 Capturing and Printing Graphics 247

Figure 12.2: The Converter program

Figure 12.3: Converter's Pie menu

the following ways:

Only one corner of it may be displayed, but rest assured, the

remainder of the image is still available: you will be able to scroll
the display window to see the rest of it.
248 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWELVE

Figure 12.4: T he Converter main menu

T he picture may appear squashed or stretched. Technically,

squashing or stretching an image in this fashion is known as
changing its aspect ratio. A menu option allows y ou to take care
of this.

Targa images will be initially loaded in as monochrome pictures,

because the alternative, matching the 32,000 colors possible in a
Targa file with the 256 available in Animator, would take too
long. During conversion, much of the Targa file's color richness
is restored.

2. Go to the Converter menu and choose Scale as in Figure 12.5.

3. To correct squashed or stretched pictures, choose Correct Aspect

Ratio. T his does not necessarily cause the full picture to be dis
played on the s creen .

TIP
Do not choose the Correct Aspect Ratio option unless the picture
is distorted, since Converter will ordinarily arrange for the proper
setting. If y ou are working with high-resolution images, such as a
640 x 480 16-color PCX format, the Correct Aspect Ratio function
may fail for lack of memory.

4. If necessary, select Width and Height to crop the picture after it is

converted. T he width and height are expressed in pixels. If you
change your mind about cropping, choose Default to re st ore the
width and height to 320 x 200.
 Capturing and Printing Graphics 249

Figure 12.5: The Scale menu

5. Select Render to perform the conversion. Several on-screen mes

sages describe the progress of the conversion. The Scale menu re
appears when the conversion is finished.

6. If necessary, select the Move option to scroll to the area you want to
save. To move the image, click on the screen to pick it up and drag
it, then click again to fix it. You can move it again as many times as
you want. Right-click to finalize the position.

7. Save the image by selecting the Save option on the Pie menu.

SUMMARY

This chapter explored ways to get pictures into and out of Animator,
beginning with a broad overview of the pros and cons of both black-and-white
250 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER TWELVE

and color printers. It stressed that color printing introduces a new host of
issues, difficulties, and expenses, as well as rewards. Then it explained how to
capture screens from practically any DOS application and translate that graph
ics data into the GIF format used by Animator. The same techinques, of course,
can be used to export Animator pictures to other graphics applications.
We've covered photographic scanners and slide-scan transfers, and
also touched on the main uses for the Converter program. We didn't discuss
translating animations from different machines, such as the Macintosh,
because these features are not widely used, and someone with plenty of
graphics experience on another computer will find these options fairly easy.
In the final chapter, we will see history repeat itself as Animator leaves
the "silent" studio and heads for stardom among the "talkies." At that
point, you will be prepared to use Animator as the cornerstone for a versa
tile multimedia workstation that delivers images, voice, music, and data to
your audience.
CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

ORCHESTRATING
YOUR
PRESENTATIONS
 A great soundtrack can turn a good
presentation into an unforgettable event. A simple experiment with your
VCR and a rented videotape will bear this out. Play one of the classic anima
tions from the golden age of theatrical shorts, shortly before or after World
War II (for instance, Bugs Bunny), with your eyes closed or the picture
turned off. I can hardly think of a better way to become firmly impressed
with the expressive richness of a powerful audio track. You will find that
audio frequently conveys at least half of the action and atmosphere of an
animation. Moreover, animation studios of those days often hammered out a
comprehensive draft of the soundtrack before rendering any of the actual
animation. The sounds, music, and voices usually provided the energy and
rhythm that inspired the animators, and of course, they always provided the
timing for the lip synching of speaking characters. Therefore, while audio
comes last in this book, ideally it should be foremost in your mind.
To cover the field of audio soundtracks in depth, we'd need a complete
book, as we have found with several other topics already, and indeed, there
are books on this subject available from a good film and video bookstore
such as Alan Gordon Enterprises in Hollywood. Fortunately, I think we've
got enough room here for a sound introduction. In this chapter, we will look
at several hardware and software solutions for digitizing audio and linking it
to a flic. Some of these products aim to do more than just provide sound for
Autodesk Animator, and they will take us beyond Animator into that explod
ing but still nebulous field known as multimedia. This seems a fitting way to
for us to conclude.
But first, let's talk about audio for video.

FINDING AUDIO FOR VIDEO

In the simplest case, the audio track for your presentation is your own
voice, providing live narration while animation plays in the background. To
go beyond this, you must turn to either a live performance of music (almost
unheard-of in corporate settings) or a recorded soundtrack composed of
music, voice, and sound effects.
 Orchestrating Your Presentations 255

W hat are your alternatives for recording music, sound, and voice?

To hire professionals to create a soundtrack

To buy pre-recorded generic sounds and music

To create your own sound, music, and narration

One alternative not listed here is to use excerpts from Ricardo Muti
conducting a symphony by Camille Saint-Saens, the evocative digital scores
of Vangelis, or the plaintive sounds of Emmylou Harris, since you would
never be able to pay these mass-market artists and their record labels for the
use of their brilliant achievements. Sure, you would probably get away with
it, but video professionals object strongly to such unethical practices, and
the legal penalties, if you were caught, could be substantial.
If you're able to hire professionals to whip up a fully custom sound
track, then you may safely skip much of the following discussion, but hiring
outside help is usually an expensive proposition. T he assumption behind
this book is that if money were no object, you'd be using a Silicon Graphics
Personal Iris workstation and software from Wavefront or T homson Digital
Images rather than a 3 8 6 machine with Autodesk Animator. But if you can
'

afford to work with a composer, San Francisco composer-producer Phil Sch

roeder has some advice for you. In the March 1990 issue of Audio Visual
Communications, he offers the following (paraphrased) suggestions:

Ask your associates to recommend an experienced composer (some

one with a "sound track record")

Get samples of the composer's work, meet with him or her person
ally, and come to a clear understanding about the finished product
before having the composer submit a written bid

Play samples of the musical effects you are after for the composer,
and be sure to listen to drafts of the music long before the score is
completed

T he second alternative is to buy a compact disc or cassette tape full of

music tailored for the most common moods of corporate video produc
tions. One arrangement for purchasing production music is called buy-out
music, because with a single purchase of a tape or CD, you can avoid com
plex and often expensive alternatives. (The traditional alternatives to buy
out are annu al licenses, which allow you to use the music in your
256 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

production studio for one year, and needle-drop fees, in which music is paid
for each time an excerpt is inserted into your soundtrack.) You can get some
excellent music for your money through buy-out, provided that you're able
to find something suitable. The drawback is that you must wade through
many cliche-ridden tracks to find something that doesn't sound like elevator
music on an adrenaline high.
Vendors of production music are happy to send you a demo CD or tape
free of charge, even to the point of providing a toll-free number, but on the
other hand, evaluating their short excerpts for potential suitability to your
project is an art in itself. To keep informed about new sources for produc
tion music (and free demos), you should scan new issues of a magazines like
Audio Visual Communications. Below arc some contacts to hel p get you
started. I should mention that the Chappell Library, available from First
Com/Music House, provided the most impressive demo I've heard, and
Audio Action runs second.

NOTE
The music from some of the companies listed below is not avail
able on a buy-out basis.

Valentino (800) 223-6278

Signature (800) 888-7151

Audio Action (800) 533-1293

Aircraft (800) 343-2514

Soper Sound (800) 227-9980

Creative Support Services (800) 468-6874

FirstCom/Music House (800) 858-8880

Associated Production Music (800) 543-4276

TIP
You can often pick up CDs of sound effects at large record stores.

The final alternative is the most challenging-creating your own music

and sound effects. In this day and age, such a project usually relies on a
 Orchestrating Your Presentations 25 7

music workstation consisting of a powerful computer with a MIDI (Musical

Instrument Digital Interface) port and some heavy-duty musical composi
tion software. But a creative person can get just as much effect or even more
from the performance of a solo guitar, flute, or piano.

RECORDING AUDIO DIGITALLY

If your goal is to synchronize the sound of shattering glass with the

image of a baseball breaking a window pane, using digitized audio from the
same hard disk that holds the flic is the best solution. Theoretically speak
ing, this should call for only the most minor of miracles, since the audio sig
nal is only about one percent as data-intensive as a raw NTSC video signal.
But in Animator, video is stored in a highly compressed form, and reading it
from the disk and decompressing it for display practically exhausts the lim
its of your microprocessor. In order to add sound, some special measures
must be taken . Think of digital recording and playback as involving the fol
lowing tasks , some of which require considerably more processing power
than others:

1. Input the analog sound signal

2. Digitize the analog signal

3. Store the digitized file

4. Retrieve the file

5. Edit the file (this may include mixing of tracks)

6. Output the new analog signal

Let's now discuss these steps individually.

BRINGING IN THE SOUND

With a digital audio card, you can connect a CD player, phonograph,
tape recorder, or microphone to your PC . Sometimes the associated soft
ware will allow you to control the incoming loudness level from your PC
keyboard. Most products on the market today accept sound through only
258 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

one channel, so often your music, narrative, and effects must be completely
mixed and ready to go before they can be recorded on your hard disk. But a
few programs, such as AASound from Evolution Technologies, allow you to
take two previously recorded sound files and mix them together. You could
theoretically continue this process indefinitely, adding layer after layer of
instruments.
Most digital audio products accept the same stereo jacks used in per
sonal stereo equipment and headphones, but few of them actually retain the
double channels of stereo sound. Most Animator-ready digital-audio cards
combine the two channels into a single (monaural) channel for recording
and playback. The chief advantage of this is that it slashes by half the elec
tronic parts used to process the analog input and output signals, the com
puter's workload, and, above all, the disk space needed to store the signal.
Audiophiles unused to the realities of video production may shudder
at the thought of deliberately destroying stereo separation, but it's really not
that bad. The truth is, stereo is a recent exception to the longstanding rule of
monaural sound on broadcast television, and you know that people watch
broadcast TV for hours on end without jumping up and screaming, "I can't
stand it! It's not stereo!" Even in big-budget video productions, a great deal
of money is spent to ensure good audio production values even when it is
understood that the final product will be shown with monaural sound.
Stereo, however, can add a dimension of spaciousness and directionality to
the sound, allowing the sound to follow an object from one side of the
screen to another-which can be quite impressive.

SAMPLING THE SOUND

Once sound is brought into your audio card for digitization, three fac
tors besides the stereo/mono issue place limitations on the eventual sound
quality: signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), sampling rate, and word size.
S/N is a measure of audio noise in the recording device itself. The
lower the signal-to-noise ratio, the more fine details of the sound are
obscured by electronic noise such as hums, static, and hissing. You can com
bat the effects of a poor SIN ratio by cranking up the input loudness and
playing the file back at a lower volume, but this method will only work up to
the device's limit on input loudness. S/N is measured in a unit called the dec
ibel (dB), and a ratio higher than 50dB is acceptable. The popular Antex
VPC625 audio card shown in Figure 13.1 has an S/N of 55dB, which is excel
lent, considering that the SIN for a phonograph cartridge is typically 58dB.
 Orchestrating Your Presentations 259

Figure 13.1: T he Antex VPC625 card is used by several companies.

T he interior of your computer is a hostile environment for precise analog

signals such as audio and video signals, because digital chips create a great deal
of radio-frequency noise. The best solution is to have all of the an alog circuitry
in a box outside the computer, and to connect this to the digitizer card by a
shielded cable.

NOTE
Unfortunately, this design is usually too expensive for the "low
end" digital-audio cards offered for use with Animator.

Your sound quality will also depend on the sampling rate. Human hearing
can detect sounds made up of frequencies between 20 and 20,000 hertz ( Hz)
ranging from just beyond the deepest murmur of distant thunder to the whine
260 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

of a jet engine. All audible sounds are composed of a number of frequencies fall
ing somewhere in this range. In order to accurately reproduce all the constitu
ent frequencies , the sampling rate must be at least twice the rate of the highest
component frequency-so to reproduce a pennywhistle with a lOKHz compo
nent, you must sample the incoming signal at a rate of at least 20KHz. Other
wise, you risk introducing a false sound called an alias frequency into the
recording. This aliasing effect makes the sound seem ''jagged'' to the ear just as
spatial aliasing in Animator makes edges look jagged to the eye, and for analo
gous reasons. The only way to have more pleasing, "anti-aliased" sound is to
run it through a filter that cuts out the high frequencies before they can be digi
tized. All audio cards do this, at the expense of cutting off some of the high fre
quency response.
Fortunately, the need for anti-aliasing does not mean that your audio
card must sample at the high rates of sampling used in a CD player (44KHz).
That's overkill. For casual purposes , a maximum sampling rate of 16KHz to
32KHz will yield fine results (corresponding to a high-frequency cut-off of
8KHz to 16KHz). Just remember that there is a price to be paid for your sam
pling rate: the higher the rate, the more disk space your file will require. At a
12KHz sampling rate, fifteen minutes of monaural audio requires about 5Mb
of disk space (using the compression technology described below).

TIP
You can cut back on storage requirements by digitizing speech at a
lower sampling rate than music.

Finally, the quality of sound is limited by the word size of your digital
samples. An 8-bit sample is only accurate within one part in 256, while the
16-bit sample found on a compact disc recording is good to within one part
in 65,536. The sample accuracy of a compact disc, like its rate, is excessive:
that is to say, it would be practically impossible for an observer to distin
guish between sound files played back at 15-bit resolution and 16-bit resolu
tion. Conversely, the AASound card from Evolution Technologies and the
Sound Blaster from Brown-Waugh use 8-bit sampling, which is too coarse
for accurate reproduction. But the MicroKey card from Video Associates
Labs (VAL), shown in Figure 13.2, uses 12-bit, accurate to one part in 4096,
which seems to be optimal. Other products from Micro-Base and Genesis
Development based on the Antex VPC625 card sample at 10 bits, which
yields an accuracy of one part in 1024.
 Orchestrating Your Presentations 261

Figure 13. 2: The Micro Key audio card

STORING YOUR SOUND

Your sound files must be played back from a hard disk or a RA M disk,
because a floppy disk is not fast enough. But since hard-disk space is always
at a premium, no matter how big the disk, you should have some way to
archive sound files on backup tapes or floppies. One way to stretch your
available disk space is to use data compression. T he MicroKey and Antex
cards both save their files using Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modula
tion, which is not as forbidding as it may sound. Pulse Code Modulation is a
regrettable misnomer that simply means the sound is digitally sampled. The
"adaptive differential" part means that what is stored is not the actual value
of a sample, but the difference between two consecutive samples, encoded
so that small changes are stored with greater accuracy than large ones.

EDITING YOUR SOUND T RACK

The real power of the computer is its virtuousity in editing a file

whether that file contains text, financial data, still images, animation, or
262 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

sound. You can cut and paste-thereby customizing-any of these data

types. Unlike text and graphics, which exist in the two-dimensional world
of the page, sound exists only in the dimension of time. Editing sound usu
ally means chopping off the end of a rambling sentence, removing odd
pauses between words, cleaning up a syllable, tightening a passage, or forc
ing the tinkle of glass to coincide with the baseball's striking the window.
Sever:,il Animator-ready audio products provide sound editors that let
you go beyond recording a finished soundtrack to rearranging it in these
ways. Examples of editing software are the Splice! editor from VAL, illus
trated Figure 13. 3, and the AASound program from Evolution Technologies,
shown in Figure 13.4. The Splice! editor provides a bar-chart representation
of sound intensity that helps you find your way through the sound file visu
ally during editing.
The AASound software doesn't provide a visual representation of the
sound waves, relying instead on the more intuitive concept of starting and
stopping a tape recorder to record new material over old, and verifying

Figure 13. 3: Editing sound with VAL' s Splice! program

 Orchestrating Your Presentations 263

Figure 13. 4: Editing sound with Evolution Technology's A ASound

program

your edits by listening to the playback. This method is not as exact as the vis
ual method, but seems less threatening to the novice than the scientific
appearance of a waveform on the screen. The user interface of the AASound
editor is a perfect extension of the Autodesk Animator interface. With the
exception of a few improvements, it looks as if it were designed by the Yost
Group , Animator's producers. The A ASound program smoothly integrates
with Animator a nd Pl ayer and both products work quite ni cel y with other
,

application programs, so you can use them to annotate documents or pro

vide an audio training session for new applications. As mentioned earlier,
AASound allows you to mix in a music track beneath a narration.
Splice! and A ASound depend on you to manually synchronize a
soundtrack with your flic. These programs simply start the flic and sound at
the same time and trust that they will stay in sync for the duration. Orches
trator from Genesis Development Corporation offers a more precise alterna
tive. It allows you to assign triggers in your soundtrack, each of which is tied
to a reference frame in the flic. In this way, the timing of critical audiovisual
264 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

events is preserved, even when the speed of the flic is changed, due to a
faster machine or the discretion of the viewer. In Orchestrator, the audio,
video, and trigger are edited in a three-column format like that used by
movie directors.

PLAYING THE SOUNDTRACK

You will hear your sound through amplified speakers attached to your
PC, or you will record it on the audio track of your videotape. In a sophisti
cated environment, a bank of musical instruments controlled by MIDI might
be also involved. At a video post-p roduction studio, you ma y even encoun
ter the SMPTE (Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers) stan
dard used by video professionals to synchronize audio and video tracks. T he
SMPTE signal can often be recorded on an unused audio track. Here are the
addresses of several audio-for-Animator manufacturers:

Antex Electronics
16100 S. Figueroa Street
Gardena, CA 90248
(213) 523-3092

Evolution Technologies
3601 S. Longfellow Circle
Hollywood, FL 33201
(305) 983-0161

Genesis Development Corporation

15840 W. Bluemound Road, Suite 307
Brookfield, WI 5 3005
(414) 796-1005

Media Vision
47221 Fremont Blvd.
Fremont, CA 94538
(415) 770-8600

Micro-Base Corporation
562 Congress Park Drive
Dayton, OH 45459
(513) 434-7072
 Orchestrating Your Presentations 265

Video Associates Labs

4926 Spicewood Springs Road
Austin, TX 78759
(512) 346-5781

Willow Peripherals
190 Willow Avenue
Bronx, NY 10454

ANIMATING DATABASE ACCESS

When you started this book, you probably thought of animation in a

certain way, maybe as something very exotic, perhaps as the exclusive prop
erty of Hollywood. At the very least, it probably seemed a complex tool use
ful only for energizing big-budget presentations. Think again. Animation
doesn't have to be reserved for a gathering of the board of directors. In the
near future, good animation design may become as important a job skill as
good page-layout design skills. We will be surrounded by animation, in the
diagnostic systems of our cars, in the security systems of our homes, and in
the video mail we exchange with business associates and family. Just think
how much easier it would be if every owner's manual that you receive used
full-motion video rather than a series of static diagrams to instruct you. And
consider how much more clearly you could imagine your new house if
architects always provided animated walkthroughs of proposed designs.
One stage in realizing this goal is a new trend in the computer industry
to use animation and narration to transform one of the most important of
traditional applications for computers-the management of large databases
containing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of records. In the past,
even the most powerful computers were used to store and retrieve only text
and financial data. Now the concept that a picture is worth a thousand
words is being taken seriously, and Autodesk Animator is playing a note
worthy role in this revolution , as demonstrated by the existence of three
multimedia software packages that use Animator flies: Ask*Me 2000,
IconAuthor, and Santa Fe Media Manager.
These three products provide serious database management capabil
ities. Any business that keeps its records on MS-DOS computers is already
committed to such database management. IconAuthor, a Microsoft Win
dows application, organizes its records in a dBASE-compatible format. Santa
266 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Fe Media Manager is based on the popular Paradox database manager. And

Ask*Me 2000, while it organizes records in graphical fields rather than text
fields, can readily exchange files with existing databases by means of the
Standard Data Format and ASCII Comma Delimited standards. Thus, busi
nesses that purchase these solutions will find them upwardly compatible
with existing databases.
The problem with a large body of data is navigating through it to find
what you need. Originally, only people who thought like programmers
could retrieve database information. Then the ''query by example'' concept
made data retrieval not much different from partially filling out a form and
having the computer fill in the details. When the information doesn't read
ily fit into standard molds, though, searching for data becomes a highly per
sonal matter, with many possible branches. Such cases call for the computer
to act as assistant, guide, and prompter, which is exactly what IconAuthor
and Ask*Me 2000 do. They are called authoring systems because they
require an expert communicator to design the interactive flow of informa
tion. Note that although Same Fe Media Manager integrates sound, anima
tion, and interactivity like IconAuthor and Ask*Me 2000, it is not an
authoring system, because it does not provide branching and some of the
other features of a hypertext application, and it does not require as much of
the communicator's expertise.
IconAuthor-see Figure 13.5-from Aim Tech Corporation in Nashua,
New Hampshire, and Ask*Me 2000-see Figure 13.6-from Innovative
Communication Systems, Inc., in Minot, North Dakota (better known as
ICS), are both the result of years of experience with multimedia authoring
systems. IconAuthor's long client list includes AT&T, Boeing, Columbia Uni
versity, Dow, and NCR. The corresponding ICS list includes EDS, IBM,
Abbot Field Engineering, and NCR.
The point of these environments is not simply to provide a friendlier
interface to traditional databases, but to incorporate that data into a rich
sensory environment for learning. According to the developers of Ask*Me
2000, the following features are the mark of the ideal authoring system:

It gives non-programmers complete, high-level control over sophis

ticated media such as laserdiscs and digital audio

It gives the viewer freedom in directing the flow of information

It provides storage variables for incorporating new data supplied by

the user
 Orchestrating Your Presentations 267

=I lconAuthor - comlink.iw
!::!elp

L_

TEXT LOOP INDE LOOP STAR

..

.. ..

Figure 13.5: The IconAuthor hypermedia authoring system

It is designed with device-independence in mind, thereby giving the

client freedom to choose the best audiovisual hardware for the
application

It puts no limits on how much data can be stored in the system

IconAuthor and Ask*ME 2000 not only work with ordinary VGA cards
and Autodesk Animator, but they also support VGA overlay on live or
recorded video, which opens the door on extraordinary applications.
Because IconAuthor is a W indows application, it supports Dynamic Data
Exchange (DDE) with other Windows applications such as Corel Draw and
Word. But this power comes at premium, since Ask*Me 2000 provides the
other functions of IconAuthor for significantly lower cost. The Ask*Me
2000 software, incidentally, supports touch-screen hardware.
268 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Figure 13 .6: The Ask* Me 2000 hypermedia authoring system

Once your audio tracks and visuals are ready to go-and this, of
course, might include the production of a complete laserdisc in a high-end
environment-you will create your hypermedia presentation using Icon
Author's visual programming or Ask*Me 2000's concise scripting lan
guage, called "STRATOS."
IconAuthor lets you assemble your program by fitting icons together
on the screen almost like a jigsaw puzzle, as pictured in Figure 13.7. There
ar_e icons named V:OVERLAY, DATE&TIME, and LOAD VAR, as well as IF and
LOOP INDEX. Text, graphics, animation, audio, and recorded video each
has its own editor program . (Guess which program acts as the main anima
tion editor? Hint: It's an Autodesk product.)
Ask* Me 2000's STRATOS scripting language uses the essential con
cepts of Before, During, and After to coordinate the actions of different
 Orchestrating Your Presentations 269

lconAuthor - comlink.iw
Iools Qptions !::!elp

Figure 13. 7: Directing the information flow using icons

media with a menu or display screen, as shown in Figure 13.8. The a,nimate
command runs a flic, and the speak command can play a sound file at the
same time.
Santa Fe Media Manager from HSC Software, while not an authoring
system, provides many of the features of Ask* Me 2000 and IconAuthor. It
not only retrieves the kind of name/date/quantity information traditionally
stored in database records, but can display still images or animation together
with audio. Interesting features include remote-control access at 2400 baud
from another computer running Santa Fe Media Manager and a macro
recording capacity like that offered by Animator. The HSC developers are
also promising to make use of JPEG image compression techniques-a wise
move to reduce the storage requirements for graphical databases. Santa Fe
Media Manager got its name from the signature aqua and pink colors used in
its handsome, streamlined screen design. In this regard, the product has a
distinct visual appeal that contrasts with the somewhat clunky appearance
of the more powerful Ask* Me 2000 and IconAuthor authoring programs.
270 MASTERING ANIMATOR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Figure 13.8: Directing the information flow using a simple script

SUMMARY

This chapter has presented many facts about audio for video that you will
not find in other references on Autodesk Animator. You now recognize your
legitimate alternative sources of audio for video: professional audio production
houses, production music libraries, and personal creativity. This has also been a
crash course in digital-audio recording. You not only know which digital-audio
cards are Animator-ready, but you have a good grasp of the issues that deter
mine the quality of your sound: signal-to-noise ratio, sampling rate, word size,
and stereo support. You understand the distinction between software that
 Orchestrating Your Presentations 271

merely starts the animation and sound at the same time and software that con
tinuously links animation to triggers in the sound file.
And finally, you have seen how animation should not stand alone, but
deserves to be smoothly integrated with other modern media, such as live
video and database access. (It is now possible, in fact, to capture live v ideo
and turn it into a miniature flic running in a corner of your screen.) The new
multimedia packages that can unify your fl ies with these rich and varied
channels of information provide an ideal showcase for your animation
efforts.
This multimedia essay concludes your sorcerer's apprenticeship in
computer animation. Instead of a sheepskin, we hereby confer upon you the
right to wear a pointed hat with stars1 but try not to look conspicuous. Mas
tering Autodesk Animator ultimately means mastering the wonder and
nuances of Nature's geometries, colors, and rhythms. In this book, you've
explored both the mundane and sublime applications of the drawing and
inking tools. You've sailed the uncharted reaches of color space. You've
entered the new dimensions of time and (in the case of Autodesk's 3D Stu
dio) depth. You've broken the sound barrier that has practically silenced the
PC since its inception in 1981. In short, you've gained the hard-won experi
ence of multimedia pioneers who have discovered how to take a dull grey
accounting machine, the IBM PC-compatible, and breathe into it something
akin to a soul. Now you know the true meaning of animation: to give some
thing a soul, a life of its own. And for those of you discouraged by the grainy
resolution of today's Animator screens, don't give up hope. In the future,
Autodesk animation products will not only be capable of playback through a
variety of displays, but they will also provide links to audio and color
printing.
As for me, I've enjoyed acting as your guide, and hope that all your
productions w ill be noteworthy.
APPENDIX

INSTALLING
AUTODESK
ANIMATOR
 S
ince Animator is distributed on both
3112-inch and 51/4-inch floppy disks, be sure to purchase the package with
the correct floppy disks for your computer. As mentioned in Chapter 1, in
addition to aa.exe, the Animator program itself, the disks provide three
additional programs, aaplay.exe, convert.exe, andflimaker.exe. If you're
low on disk space, you should know that the only program strictly required
for creating animations is aa. exe, Aaplay. exe is the Player program and con
vert. exe is the Converter program.
Beyond the programs, these disks provide sample flies such as mrnu
mo.fli, some picture files (they have agifsuffix), many font files, and a sam
ple cel,fish.cel. Useful flies, fonts, and pictures are provided in compressed
form in the "unpack" executable files. If you're running extremely low on
disk space, however, you may not wish to load and unpack these files.
Installation generally involves creating a hard-disk directory for Ani
mator, copying the files from the distribution disks to that directory, and
decompressing the''unpack' 'files. Let's look at a typical installation session,
which assumes that you're copying the files to a subdirectory on hard-disk
partition C. If you want to use another hard-disk partition, such as D, E, or F,
the procedure is the same, with the substitution of that drive letter.

1. Make a directory on your hard-disk drive with the DOS mkdir

command. Enter the following two lines .

cd c:\
mkdir c:\aa
2. Change to the floppy-disk drive (probably drive A) holding the
Autodesk Animator Disk 1 and copy its files to your hard disk .

a:
copy *. * c:\aa
After all files have been transferred, insert the other disks and copy
their files to your hard disk, using the same command. When you're
finished, you may wish to return to the hard disk with the com
mand c: and change to the directory where you can give DOS com
mands, for instance, cd c:\ or cd c:\dos. Then you can format
 Installing Autodesk Animator 275

some unused floppy disks and use the DOS diskcopy command to
make backups of your Animator disks. This is an irksome step, I
know, but you may be glad you did it later on.

3. Read the documentation update file, readme.doc, by loading it into

your word processor and printing it. You will have to give your
word processor the pathname for the file, since it won't be found in
any of your usual text directories. Exit your word processor and
change to the aa directory.

4. If you have about a megabyte of free disk space, you can safely
unpack the compressed treasures in the "unpack" files. Enter
unpack 1, and if you have a second "unpack" file, enter
unpack2.

NOTE
There are two "unpack" files on the 51/4-inch floppy disk but
there is enough room on a 3112-inch disk to put all the data into one
"unpack" file.

5. At this point, all your files are stored in the aa directory, and you're
probably eager to begin using Animator immediately, which is just
fine. But if you're not that impatient, or if you're reading this by
chance after you've already installed Animator, why not take out a
moment to tidy up your studio? Build subdirectories under the aa
directory for pictures, flies, eels, fonts, and so on, such as:

c:\aa\aaclips

c:\aa\cels
c:\aa\flicsl
c:\aa\flics2
c:\aa\fonts
c:\aa\gifl
c:\aa\gif2
c: \aa\imported

c:\aa\macros
276 MASTERING ANIMATOR
APPENDIX A

Move your eels , GIF files, flies, and so on from your aa directory
into these subdirectories, either using the DOS copy command,
followed by deleting the file from the original aa directory, or by
using the move option of your favorite DOS shell program, such as
PC Tools Deluxe. In this example, imported Targa and PCX files
would be stored in imported, and Autodesk Animator Clips would
be stored in aaclips.

6. After you install the software, return your Registration Card in

order to receive Autodesk's bonus software-including additional
fonts, a fascinating macro demo, and updated programs. For in
stance, the Converter program originally shipped with Animator
Version 1.0 converted only 16-color PCX files, but the present ver
sion will also convert 256-color PCX files.

7. If you are having trouble starting up Animator, here are a few trou
bleshooting pointers.

Is your mouse hardware working, and is its driver loaded? The

software driver for your mouse must usually be loaded in at
boot-up time with a command in the DOS CONFIG.SYS file,
which is described in Appendix B. If you have any doubts about
whether your mouse is working, stop what you are doing and
run the test program that came with your mouse. Sometimes
Animator gives a "Mouse not installed" error if it determines that
a mouse is not Microsoft-compatible.

Are you using a R A M disk to store Animator's temporary files? If

the RAM disk isn't ready, Animator will usually give you an error
message and have you choose a hard-disk partition for storing
temporary files. In order to use a RAM disk, you must give the
proper commands in your CONFIG.SYS files, as explained in
Appendix B.

Are you using a VGA-to-video encoder? These products usally

require their own driver programs. You must run these programs
before starting Animator.

Is your computer configured to automatically load any "termi

nate and stay resident'' (TSR) programs such as SideKick? These
sometimes interfere with Animator, causing it to lock up. In such
cases, you will have to take measures to prevent TSRs from being
loaded automatically by using an alternate AUTOEXEC.BAT or
CONFIG.SYS file.
 Installing Autodesk Animator 277

If you get an "Out of Memory" error, and can't continue, try

using the Release options of the Swap, Mask , and Cel menus, or
even the New option of the Flies menu. This message means that
Animator can't find a large enough continuous stretch of free
memory in the 640K of memory provided by DOS. If you actu
ally have enough free RAM for Animator, but it has become unus
able because of fragmentation, it is sometimes possible to restore
continuity by exiting and reloading Animator. Make sure no TSRs
are loaded. You should also know that memory-manager pro
grams, such as 386MAX on 80 386 systems or QRAM on 80286
systems, are often able to load device drivers above the 640K
memory limit of DOS, thereby freeing up more precious memory
for your use.
APPENDIX

IMPROVING
PERFORMANCE
 This appendix covers a host of
performance issues. While its main focus is improving the rate at which flies
can be played, it also mentions ways to improve your own performance as
the manager of a computer-based animation studio. For instance, we will
consider how best to use DOS files such as AUTOEXEC.BAT and CON
FIG.SYS, or how to use a good DOS shell program such as PC Tools Deluxe
to help you navigate through the files on your hard disk. The more you
know in this regard , the more you should be able to concentrate on anima
tion and less on system administration.
Let's begin by re-emphasizing that Autodesk Animator is not a tradi
tional graphics application like a desktop-publishing or paint program. In
these applications, the more speed the better, but speed is not critical in
determining the final product: a laser-printed page looks the same whether
it took two or five minutes to print. In Animator, however, very slight delays
in updating the screen can throw off the timing of an animation. The result is
about as visually appealing as a ballerina who falters across the stage. I think
it is safe to predict that after you begin working with Animator, everything
you can do to speed up your computer, you will do.
Here are the factors that determine how fast (and therefore, how
smoothly) you can play a flic:

The amount of "action" in the flic itself

The "clock speed" of your computer

The efficiency of data transfer to your VGA card

The efficiency of data transfer from your disk

The amount of "action" in the flic is certainly under your control. For
instance, if you are using an 8MHz IBM-XT compatible with a relatively slow
disk drive, you can still create and view flies that run smoothly if you limit
yourself to flies that make very modest demands . These might include color
cycling flies and flies in which only a small part of the screen changes from
frame to frame. For most readers, however, this is quite an unacceptable
solution , and therefore, I will not discuss it further.
 Improving Performance 281

The next factor is ''clock speed,'' a measure of how fast the micropro
cessor chip runs. The faster the chip, the faster it can transfer updated infor
mation to your VGA card, and this is true regardless of the exact chip inside
your computer. Note that a 20MHz 80 386 microprocessor will not run Ani
mator any faster than a 20MHz 80286; Autodesk Animator Version 1.0 was
not written to take advantage of any specific instructions in the 80 386 chip.
As far as Version 1.0 is concerned, the advantages of the 80 386 for anima
tion lie solely in its superior support for RAM-disk software, as you will see
shortly. Also note that Animator does not make use of a math-coprocessor
chip, so adding a math chip will not speed up Animator.
Some VGA cards will accept data more efficiently than others. One of
the main factors in efficiency is the size of the data path to the card. Since a
16-bit data path is theoretically faster than an 8-bit path, your VGA card
should ideally be a 16-bit VGA card. Most of the VGA-to-video cards are 16-
bit. It would probably be a mistake to try to save a few dollars by getting an
off-brand VGA card if your main application is Animator. Note, however,
that an XT-compatible computer accepts only 8-bit cards.
Finally, there is the issue of the disk drive's speed, since an animation
runs while the flic is being read from disk. For flies in which a large portion
of the screen changes quickly, the best results come from using a RAM disk.
A RAM disk is a portion of your computer's memory that is used to simulate a
very fast hard disk. This is a good use for any RAM memory your computer
has beyond lMb, since DOS applications like Animator can't use that mem
ory directly, but can use it for a RAM disk.
In order to use a RAM disk, you must have RAM-disk driver software. MS
DOS Version 3.0 and higher include such a program. The drawback is that the
RAMDRIVE program expects the memory expansion card in your computer to
confonn to the Expanded Memory Specification (EMS ) EMS 4.0 standard, and it
is quite possible that the extra memory in your computer will not conform.
Without EMS 4.0 emulation, you may not be able to address any RAM memory
above lMb, even though you may have paid extra for it. That's why it's useful
to have an 80 386 microprocessor. Unlike the 80286, the 80 386 is able to easily
simulate EMS 4.0 memory access with software, and therefore can use that
memory for a RAM disk. It should be clear that ifyou can set up a RAM disk on
your system, the more memory you have to spare for the RAM disk, the better.

NOTE
You can expect to get about one minute of real-time animation
playback for each megabyte of RAM-disk space.
282 MASTERING ANIMATOR
APPENDIX B

Understand that simply having an 80386 chip is not the whole solu
tion; you may also require a memory-manager program such as 386MAX or
Desqview's QEMM. This all adds to the expense of running Animator, but if
you're doing heavy-duty real-time animation, it's a necessity.
This discussion leads us naturally to the issue of two special DOS files
named AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, universally used to initialize
DOS systems when the power is switched on. The AUTOEXAC.BAT file
directs DOS with many of the same kinds of commands that you would issue
from the keyboard. For instance, the AUTOEXEC.BAT file changes the cur
rent working directory to a certain disk and directory. It can direct DOS in
searching for executable programs among your subdirectories by providing
a path statement. It may also provide the name of a program to execute as
soon as the boot-up is complete. Using AUTOEXEC.BAT, you can have your
machine launch Animator automatically as soon as you turn it on. Depend
ing upon your mouse or digitizer tablet, AUTOEXEC.BAT may be able to
load its device driver. To learn more about using this file, ask any experi
enced DOS user or consult one of the many books on MS-DOS, such as the
Sybex book Mastering DOS.
The CONFIG.SYS file is even more important than AUTOEXEC.BAT,
because it is often the only way to load many device drivers for mice, digi
tizer tablets, memory-manager programs, and RAM disks. One of the annoy
ances of CONFIG.SYS is its sheer inflexibility in the face of your changing
needs. For instance, let's say that you have both Animator and 3D Studio,
and you want to run Animator with a 2Mb RAM disk, but when you run 3D
Studio, you want most of that memory for use directly by 3D Studio (which
isn't restricted by the DOS !Mb ceiling). Usually, you must provide these for
two different boot-up situations by maintaining completely different CON
FIG.SYS files on two floppy disks; a single CONFIG.SYS file doesn't provide
any symbol for "commenting-out" a command or br anching upon a certain
input. The only way at present to provide flexibility in your CONFIG. SYS
files is to find a utility such as Boot.sys, a shareware program that allows you
to change your CONFIG.SYS options during boot-up. Trying to cover all the
combinations for your different needs (for instance, if you want to use a
mouse sometimes and a digiziter tablet at other times, as I do), can still be
extremely tedious. Again, for help with CONFIG.SYS, turn to an experi
enced user or a book on using DOS batch files.
If you haven't got a DOS shell program such as PC Tools Deluxe, X Tree,
or Norton Commander, then you simply don't know what you're missing.
Running a hard disk without them is like "flying blind." These semi
graphical user interfaces provide a roadmap through the jungle of directo
ries and files on your disk. They will instantly locate a file for you, given part
 Improving Performance 283

TIP
I expect Microsoft to make configuring your computer much eas
ier when it releases MS-DOS 5.0.

of the name of the file. They will move files from one directory to another
with the click of a mouse. They also make it possible for you to recover data
after a hard disk disaster, or simply to archive extra data on floppy disks or
tape. In fact, there's not enough room here to list the numerous ways that
they can help you manage your animation studio.
As you create more animations, you will run up against the limitations
of your hard disk. For many people, the solution is to swap out entire direc
tories of files to a tape backup unit, although more expensive and more
exotic kinds of reusable media, such as Bernoulli cartridges and eraseable
optical drives, are also useful. Each medium has its pros and cons.
Finally, a shareware program called Pkzip, available universally on
computer bulletin board systems (BBS), will help you compress your flies
for distribution on floppy disks. The Pkzip program is often able to com
press a megabyte of data by 40 percent or more, an incredible savings in
space. You've already encountered this program, since Autodesk itself uses
it to make the Animator distribution disks. Contact your favorite BBS for
details.
APPENDIX

ADDITIONAL
FONTS FOR
ANIMATOR
 As mentioned in Chapter 7, Autodesk
sends registered users a bonus disk containing fonts that aren't found on the
Animator distribution disks. Table C.1 contains a complete list of the fonts
on the bonus disk. Note that the number that forms part of the name is not a
reliable indicator of actual size.

Table C.1: Animator's Fonts.

FONT COMMENTS

ARCH14t A modernistic sans serif face associated with the

Bauhaus architectural movement
ARCH18 A larger version of Arch
ARCHPIO Another modernistic sans serif face

ARCHP14 A larger version of Archp

ARCHP20 See above

ARCHP28 See above

ARCHP36t See above

ARMYI4 A heavy stencil font, available in capitals only

ARMY18 A larger version of Army

ARMY24t See above

BANK24 The bold form of Block. Tip: use Bank for titles
or emph asis in text composed with Block

BLOCK20t A semi-serif face modeled after Lubalin

Graph-has an "engineering" feel

BOOKI4 A well-designed serif face modeled after

Bookman
BOOK18 A larger version of Book
BOOK24 See above
DEC024t A face turned firmly towards the 1920s: should
be used in advertising that wishes to convey that
feel
 Additional Fonts for Animator 287

Table C.l: Animator's Fonts(continued).

FONT COMMENTS

DEC048t A larger version of Deco

DECOLN26 A fancier form of Deco
DECOLN48 A larger version of Decoln
EARLY IO The Early family contains some of Animator's
most elegant fonts-it seems to be closely
modeled after Century Old Style
EARLY14t A larger version of Early
EARLY20 See above
EARLY28 See above
EDGE13 The Edge fonts have an exciting futuristic flavor,
as if copied from an LED readout on a dashboard
EDGE26 A larger version of Edge-you can improve
legibility by adding thin lines (brush size = 1) in
the internal gaps
EIGER14 A Helvetica clone
FRAT24 It's all Greek to me...
FRILLY24 A novelty font that suggests an ice cream parlor
circa 1890
FRILLY48 A larger version of Frilly
GIAN T24 A strong Art Deco novelty font-the uppercase is
much more appealing than the lowercase
GIANT48 A larger (!) version of Giant
HOBBIT14 As seen on the covers of ].R.R. Tolkien
paperbacks-okay for elf stories
HOBBI T18 A larger version of Hobbit
HOBBIT24 See above
MAPS24 Pseudo-cartographic symbols: stars, crosses,
tents, globes, buildings, churches, people, etc.,
and some bizarre icons, including some
unrecognizable ones
288 MASTERING ANIMATOR
APPENDIX C

Table C.1: Animator's Fonts(continued).

FONT COMMENTS

MODERN14 Animator's best sans-serif font, modeled after

Futura
MODERN18 A larger version of Modern
MODERN24 See above
NEWS18 A Times Roman clone
NEWYRK09 A small serif script, okay for labelling graphs
POST42 This font is apparently modeled after Garamond
Bold, and in general terms is probably the best of
the bunch-if you have room for such a large
font
POST54t A larger version of Post
QUILL20 A 1950s-style script font excellent for general
use, but particularly effective for awards and
citations
QUILL28 A larger version of Quill
QUILL36 See above
RIPPLE24 An attractive implementation of Zapf Chancery,
but it suffers from a bad case of the jaggies and is
too thin to clean up with Unzag
SAIL A plain, fairly clear font suitable for small spaces
SCHOOL24 A plain, clear sans-serif font modeled after
Universe
SCHOOL36 A larger version of School
SCHOOL48 See above
SCIFI08t A novelty font modeled after the
machine-readable characters developed in the
1960s-has a hackneyed, "computerized" feel
SCIFI16 A larger version of Scifi
SCIFI32 See above
SCIFIT08 An alternate version of Scifi
SCIFIT16 See above
SCIFIT32 See above
 Additional Fonts for Animator 289

Table C.1: Animator's Fonts(continued).

FONT COMMENTS

SCRIPT24 A cursive script with educational associations,

good in some applications, but might cause
legibility problems because the letters can run
together
SCROLL14 A serif face modeled after Goudy-the smaller
sizes look pretty rough
SCROLL IS A larger version of Scroll
SCROLL24 See above
SUPBOL22t A clone of Eurostile Bold that packs a lot of
punch-legibility very good, particularly when
exotic inks are needed
SUPBOL32t A larger version of Supbol
SYMBOL14 These include stars, snowflakes, boxes, triangles,
and various other items that can be used as
"bullets" for lists, also some shapes that
resemble the overhead view of trees in an
architect's plan
SYMBOL18 A larger version of Symbol
SYMBOL24 See above
SYSTEMt The font used in Animator's own menus
VELVET IO A clone of Helvetica-for best results, use the
largest size possible in your work
VELVET12 A larger version of Velvet
VELVET14t See above
VELVET IS See above
VELVET24t See above
VELVET42 See above
VELVET54 See above
WESTIOt Appears to be a flattened version of Garamond
Bold
WEST36t A larger version of West
290 MASTERING ANIMATOR
APPENDIX C

Table C.1: Animator's Fonts( continued).

FONT COMMENTS

WINDYllt The sans serif answer to Booni, composed of

alternating heavy and light upright strokes.
Suffers from some unevenness between
characters-for instance, the w is overly heavy,
so you must use with care
WINDY14 A larger version of Windy
WINDY18t See above
WINDY22 See above

t Included with Animator

In addition, Autodesk has provided software developers with a great

deal of information on the internal workings of Animator, including a
description of the structure of Animator font files. Entropy Engineering has
used this information to create its own font expansion pack. The fonts in
this pack are useful for both text and titling.
Entropy Engineering's Video Fonts FontPak HC-1 for Animator con
tains about ten font families in a variety of sizes. The Video Fonts material
requires about l.5Mb on your hard disk.
The faces include the western face shown in Figure C.1, the University
Roman face shown in Figure C.2, and the bold, calligraphic face shown in
Figure C.3.
Other interesting items in this package are a 3-D Victorian font called
COP14HS, an ecclesiastic sampling of the Cloister font, and a script font
called Park Avenue.
You can contact Entropy Engineering at the following address:

Entropy Engineering
12371 Village Square Terrace
Suite 202
Rockville, MD 20852
 Additional Fonts for Animator 291

Figure C.1: A western-style face in the PL family

Figure C.2: A ritzy face in the UR family

292 MASTERING ANIMATOR
APPENDIX C

Figure C.3: A powerful face called BEC

 INDEX

dispiay adapter requirement

A
for, 4
AA.EXE file, 7 exchanging images with other
AAPLAY.EXE file, 7 software in, 239-245
AASound program, 258, 260, fonts for, 118-119
262-263 hardware requirements for, 4-6
About (Player) option, 17 Home menu option in, 9
adaptive differential pulse code importance of speed to, 280-281
modulation, 261 initial screen for, 25
addition button ( + ) , 110, 126 installing, 274-277
ADO (Ampex Digital Optical) list of program files for, 7-8
products, 140 printing screens from, 235-239,
Aim Tech Corporation, 266 242-243
aligning quitting, 29
shapes, 45-47 reconfiguring, 26
text, 124 resetting, 28-29
Amiga computers, 4, 218, 246 scripts in, 22-24, 171-174
Ampex Digital Optical (ADO) sources of audio for, 254-257
products, 140 starting, 24-26
Animals/Fantasy animation library, startup troubleshooting in, 276
179-180 user interface for, 16, 24
animation. See also flies Amiga vs., 4
Animator functions for, 9-10 Antex audio card, 260, 261
eel-based, 101-103 Antex Electronics, 264
origin of, 100-101 anti-aliasing, 58
pacing of, 109-111 Applause II, import/export file
recording on videotape of, 4, formats, 240
215-220 Application Techniques Co.,
single-frame, recording of, 225 241-242
steps in, 101-103 APPROACH.OPT file, 156
types of, 4, 10 Arrange menu, 78
Animation ToolKit (AT K), 176 arrow keys, 21, 23
Animator ASCII text files, 16, 22
configuring, 25-26 Ask* Me 2000
converting foreign file formats as database animator, 265-268
into GIF formats with, import/export file formats, 240
246-249 aspect ratio, correcting, 248
294 MASTERING ANIMATOR

asterisk ( * ),111 blurring images with Soften tool, 38

Atari S T file format,246 Box drawing tool,36,54-55, 63
audio Bright inking tool, 71, 152
monaural vs. stereo,258 brightness. See luminance
products fo r,257-258,260-261 broadcast television,213-215
quality of,258-261 Brush Size indicator,35,44
digitally recording,257-265 buffers. See Cel buffer; Swap
sources of,254-257 buffer
audio cards,257-258,260-261 business presentations . See
Audio Visual Connector (AVC) presentations
frame grabber,228 buttons,9
authoring systems, 266-267 BYE.FL! file, 136
AutoCAD
import/export file formats,239
using Animator with,7-8,
c
176-178
Autodesk products Cancel option,109
Animals/Fantasy Clips,179-180 Canon Xapshot still video camera,
Animator. See Animator 227
AutoCAD,7-8,176-178,239 case sensitivity,7
ImageCels,176-178 Cel buffer,39-42
3D Studio,176, 180-184, 185 Cel menu,10
AUTOEXEC.BAT file,282 Cel optical element,141, 154
AutoShade 2.0, 176 Cel option
Home menu,9
Value menu,79
eels,10, 101-103
B animating,154
Backspace key, 128 buffer for, 39-42
Backwards option,91, 107,157 capturing, 41, 43
bar sheets,101 flipping upside down, 57
Barneyscan slide scanner,245 ImageCels,177
BARS.GIP file, 87,168 moving,57
Beta tape format, 222-224 origin of term,101
black-and-white cluster box, 35, overlaying, 65,91
38,64 resizing,56
black-and-white gradients,64 reversing,57
black-and-white printers, saving screens as,54,65,152
235-236 stretching,55-58,61-62
Blend option,79 centering text,121-122
 Index 295

central menu panel, 8-9. See also color printers, 236-237

Home menu panel ink-jet, 237-239
CHIEF.CEL file, 54 thermal transfer, 237
CHIEF2.CEL file, 58 color spaces, 84
CHIEF.FU file, 168 colors. See also Current Color slot
chroma signal, 85,215-218 arranging, 77-7 8
Circle drawing tool, 45, 150 brightness of, 78
circle wipes, 166, 171, 174 encoding of, 213-215
Clear Key Color button (K), 41, on-screen matrix of, 4, 72
149 replacing, 79
clear key matte, 52, 124 reversing order of, 64, 75, 81
Clear option, 26, 28, 36 selecting from screen, 65
clicking, 11 sorting, 78
clip art, 177 communication. See presentations
Clip option, 42, 63-65, 152 Complete option, 109-110
Clips software Composite option, 166-167
ImageCels series, 176-178 composite video signal, 216-217
importing animations from, compressed files, 7
179-180 Computer Eyes frame grabber, 229
clock speed, 281 CONFIG.SYS file, 282
cluster boxes, 34-35,70, 74 Configure menu, 26-27
black-and-white, 35,38, 64 Continue Move option, 144-145,
ramps and, 80-81,92, 130 155-156
reversing order in, 64, 75, 81 Continuous Edge Graphics (CEG)
Current Color slot vs., 70-71 chip, 219
Mini-Palette vs., 74 Converter program, 7-8, 202,
Cluster menu, 64, 74-77, 80-81 228,240,246-249
CMY (cyan/magenta/yellow) color CONVERT.EXE file, 7
model, 84, 85-87 Corel Draw, import/export file
COL filename extension, 73 formats, 239
color cycling, 10, 87-91 corporate video, 222-225
color files, 71-73 Correct Aspect Ratio option, 248
color fitting, 74 Crop option, 175
color gradients, 70, 74 current color, 35-36,54, 70, 88
color cycling, for, 87-89 Current Color slot, 27, 36,65
creating, 80-82, 92-94, cursor, 11
129-130 Cut option, 79
restoring, 78 Cycle Draw option, 70-71
reversing, 75, 81 Cycle option, 78
color palettes, 70-74
296 MASTERING ANIMATOR

electronic still photography,

D
227-228
Dark inking tool, 71, 152 Element menu, 141, 154
database management, 265-270 elements, 141-142, 150-155
default files, 27 Emboss inking tool, 63-64, 113
default flic, 27 encoding color, 213-215
default palette, 79 Enter key, 7
DEFAULT.FLX file, 27, 79 ENT ER.OPT file, 155
delta records, 104 Entropy Engineering, 123, 290
demo reel, 170-171 Escape key, 150
digital audio products, 257-258, Evolution Technologies, 258, 260,
260-261 262, 264
Digital Vision frame grabber, 228 EXE filename extension, 7
directories, 275-276 Expanded Memory Specification
disk-drive speed, 281 (EMS) 4.0, 281
display adapters for Animator, 4 Extra menu, 26, 45-46
Dissolve option, 166, 168, 171 Extra option (Home menu), 9
Dither option, 37-38
dithering, 38-40, 58, 237
Do T itling option, 132
F
double-clicking, 11
dragging, 11 F (Filled) button, 35, 63
Draw button, 27 fade outs, 165, 169-170
drawing screen, 9 FAXB ACK.FLI file, 157
drawing tools, 4, 9, 24-25 FAX.FU file, 115, 157
menu of, 35-36, 45 File menu, 18
using, 52-62 files
Dy namic Data Exchange (DDE), color, 71-73
267 def ault, 27
loading, 18-20
Files option, 48, 54, 56, 70, 73, 91
Fill button, 9, 35, 54
E fill-line text justification, 121
ED-Beta videotape format, 224 Find Ramp option, 76-77, 80-81
Edit option, 124 Fit button, 83
Edit Text option, 128, 132 FLASH.FU file, 111
Edsun Laboratories, 219 flatbed scanners, 245
Effects option, 174-176 FLI files, 20-21
EGA cards, 210 FU Load option, 18
8mm videotape format, 224 flic control keys, 21, 23, 25
 Index 297

flic file format, 8 fonts, 60, 118-119

Flic optical element, 141 bonus disk of, 118, 286-290
Flic option, 9, 20 changing, 125-126
flies, 20-21, 167 default, 125
audio for, 254-257 from Entropy Engineering,
combining, 165-171 290-292
compositing, 166-167 legibility concerns in use of, 122
creating, 7 novelty, 122
editing segments of, 111-112 sans-serif, 122
erasing, 28 sources for, 7,286-292
frames in, 27-28,70,89 working with, 128
importing from Clips, 179-180 Frame Count option, 133-135
joining, 165-166, 168,179 frame grabbers, 182,212,
latest, 27 227-228,245
linking, 165-171 frame ID box, 28,89,110
loading, 20-21, 24 frames, 28,89,167, 212
modify ing, 7 manually altering, 114
one-frame, 168 deleting, 112
playing, 20-21,26-27, 91 inserting, 89-90,104-105,
preventing latest from 110-111
loading, 27 palettes for, 70
reducing, 175 reproducing, 110-111, 168
saving backwards, 91,107, 157 restoring, 70
scrolling text with, 134-136 Frames menu panel, 89-90,104,
sources for, 7 110-111
special effects in, 174-176 Freelance Plus, import/export file
starting, 21 formats, 240
stopping, 23
text in, 119-124
transitional, 169-171
use of negative frame in, 94,
G
112, 157
viewing, 7, 21 Gel tool, 71
pies vs., 167-168 Genesis Development
writing scripts for, 22-24, Corporation, 260, 263
171-174 genlock, 218-219
Flies menu, 174 Get Cluster option, 74-76,80,
Flimaker program, 7-8, 176 130
FLIMAKER.EXE file, 7 Get option, 41,43, 54, 113
Font option, 60-61, 125 GIF filename extension, 18
298 MASTERING ANIMATOR

GIF files, 19-20, 72,168,181, Hgrad inking tool, 64

202,239-240, 244,246 Hi-8 videotape format, 216,
GIF Load option, 18 224-225
Glass inking tool, 9, 65,149 high definition television (HDTV),
options menu for, 37-38 212-213,216
pasting eel with, 41 HiJaak/Inset graphics format
gradients, 64 translator, 241
black-and-white, 64 HLS color model, 84-85,129-130
color, 70,74 Home menu bar, 9
creating, 80-82,92-94, Home menu panel, 9,24-25,29,
129-130 34, 70
reversing, 64, 75,81 HOME&CAR.GIF file, 59-60, 65
Gradients option, 78 Howtek Pixelmaster color printer,
GrafPlus graphics format 238
translator, 241 Howtek ScanMaster II scanner,
Graphics Interface Format. See 245
GIF files HP PaintJet printer, 237-239,
Graphics Link Plus, 241 242-243
Grays Only option, 176 HSC ImageTools, 241
Grid option, 45-47 HSC Software, 241,269
Grid Snap Control menu, 46,53 hue, 84. See also HLS color model
GRNSTAR.GIF file, 152 hypermedia, 240,266-267

H
hand-held scanners, 244-245 lconAuthor
HANDS.FU file, 22 as database animator, 265-268
hard disks, 283 import/export file formats, 240
Animator files on, 6-7 ImageCels, 176-178
Animator's use of, 5-6 images. See also eels
managing, 164 exchanging with other software,
hardware required for Animator, 239-245
4-6 importing, 243-245
Harvard Graphics, import/export temporary storage of, 39-45
file formats, 240 IMG file format, 242
HDTV (high definition television), importing images, 243-245
212-213, 216 improved definition television
Hewlett-Packard PaintJet printer, (IDTV), 213
237-239,242-243 In Slow option, 109-111
 Index 299

industrial video products, key matte, 52, 124

223-225 KEYBO.TXT file, 128
Ink Strength slider bar, 37-38 Keyframer module (30 Studio),
inking tools, 4, 24-25 180, 182
menu of, 35-36
options menu for, 37-38
using, 62-65, 128-131
L
Inner Radius Ratio slider bar, 54
Innovative Communication Lgrad inking tool, 128, 130
Systems, Inc., 266 Line Cluster option, 76-77, 83
Insert button, 89, 110, 168 Line drawing tool, 46, 152
Inset Systems, Inc. , 241 Load a Picture? menu panel,
installing Animator, 274-277 19-20
interlacing, 212-213 Load an Animation? menu panel, 20
Invert option, 76 Load Font option, 132
IRIS.FU file, 111 Load Text option, 132
lowercase vs. uppercase text, 122
luminance, 78, 84-85
J Luminance option, 78
luminance signal, 215-217
jaggies, 38, 58-59, 60
Jewell Technologies, Inc. , 241
Join Flic? dialog box, 168
Join option, 165-166, 168 M
joining flies, 165-166, 168, 179
Mach bands, 38
Jovian Logic VIA frame grabber,
Macintosh file format, 246
228
macros, 126-127
Jovian Logic VIN encoder, 181,
Magni Systems VGA Producer
208, 219-220
card, 4-5, 218-219
JPEG image compression, 269
marquee box, 12, 39, 41
Jumble ink, 71
Materials Editor module (30
justifying text, 121-122
Studio), 180, 182
JX-100 scanner, 245
Matrox Illuminator frame grabber,
228
Mavica still video camera, 227
K
Mccay, Winsor, 101
K (Clear Key Color) button, 41, Media Vision, 264
149 memory managers, 277, 282
kerning, 123-124 menu bar, 9, 24, 29
key color, 52, 88, 124 menu panels, 8-9, 11-12, 20
Key Color slot, 41, 52-54, 149 Metheus Premier VGA card, 219
300 MASTERING ANIMATOR

Micro-Base Corporation, 264 optical effects, 10, 140

MicroKey audio card, 260-261 designing motions for, 148-150,
Microsoft Windows, 265,267 155-156
MIDI(Musical Instrument Digital elements in, 141-142, 150-155
Interface), 257 mouse control of, 145-146
Mil videotape format, 224 preset motions for, 146-147
Mini-Palette, 36-37, 44,52-53, previewing, 149-150
74 slider-bar controls for, 143-145
Mitsubishi HS-USO VCR, 225 using with tweening, 157-159
Mitsubishi multiscanning monitor, Optics menu panel, 10, 140,
5-6,221 148-150,155
monitors for VGA and television Orchestrator software, 263-264
input, 5-6,221 Out Slow option, 109-110
mouse, 11 Outline optical element, 142
Mouse Control menu panel, overlaying images, 41,65
145-146
mouse drivers, 242 p
Move option, 57,148,154-156,
pacing flies, 109-111
246,249
PageMaker, import/export file
MRNUMO.FLI file, 22
formats, 239
multiplication(*) buttons, 111
PaintJet printer, 237-239,
multiscanning monitors, 5-6, 221
242-243
palette, default, 79
palette files, 73
N Palette menu panel, 10,70-74,85
NEC PC-VCR video recorder, 225 Palette submenu, 72
Negative option, 78-79,94, 112, palette tools, 2 5
157 Panasonic still video equipment,

New option, 26, 28,167 227

New Text option, 132 Paste option, 41-42, 65,79,91,
NT SC color encoding, 181, 152
214-216,223 Path option, 149
NTSC.COL file, 73 pathnames, 171, 173
PC Tools Deluxe, 164
PCX file format, 202,239-240,
245-246
0 PGIF software, 243
One Palette option, 164 PHIPS graphics format translator,
Opaque inking tool, 9,27, 36, 41, 241
53, 125, 149 photographs, importing, 244-245
 Index 301

pie files, 18 completeness vs. conciseness in,

Pie menu (Converter), 246-247 192
Pie option (Home menu), 9 consistency vs. novelty in, 193
PICEM graphics format translator, critical discrimination vs.
241 restraint in, 193-194
PICLAB graphics format translat01 introductions in, 197
241 layout of, 199-201
pies, 7, 18, 103, 168. See also GIF length of, 194-195
files making effective, 191-195
displaying without menus, 20 planning of, 195-204
loading latest, 24 precision vs. simplicity in,
tinting, 83 192-193
flies vs., 167-168 printed messages in, 198-199
pictures. See pies software packages for, 191
Ping-Pong option, 75, 109, 110 structure of, 168-171, 195-197
Pixar, 176 Presets menu, 146-147
Pixelmaster color printer, 238 Preview option, 90, 109, 149-150
Pizazz Plus, 241-242 printers
Pkzip program, 283 black-and-white, 235-236
Place Window option, 132 color, 236-239
playback-speed slider bar, 111 production music, 255-256
Player program, 7-8, 16 "prosumer" video market, 223
removing menu display from, 20 pulse code modulation, 261
running scripts in, 23, 165, 171
using, 16-21
Player screen, 17
plus sign ( + ), 110, 126 Q
Poly drawing tool, 10, 107 QMS Colorscript color printer,
Poly (polygon) drawing tool, 4 238
Poly tool, 53 query by example, 266
Polygon optical element, 142 Quit option, 17, 29
polymorphism, 106, 112
PORTRAIT.GIF file, 79, 103
presentation graphics software,
240 R
presentations, 190 ragged-right text, 121-122
animation in, 204-205 RAM, 277
business graphics in, 201-204 RAM disks, 281-282
color in, 190-191 Ramp option, 77-78, 80, 92, 130
302 MASTERING ANIMATOR

ramps, 70 ScanMaster II, 245

adjusting manually, 88 scanned-in objects as animator
color cycling, 87-89 eels, 177
creating, 80-82, 92-94, scanners, 244-245
129-130 black-and-white vs. color,
restoring, 78 244-245
Release option, 43, 277 color slides production on, 245
remapping. See color fitting flatbed, 245
Render option, 90-91, 109, hand-held, 244-245
149-150 scanning rates, 212-213
Renderer module (3D Studio), Scrape inking tool, 42-43,
180, 181 107-108
Renderman scene-description screen
language, 176 capturing, 4 1-4 3
Reset option, 26, 28-29, 34 clearing, 28
Restore option, 26-28, 70, 74, 79 saving as eel, 54, 65, 152
Return key, 7 saving as GIF file, 65
Reuse option, 128 storing, 42-43
Reverse option, 64, 75, 81, screen capture software, 240-242
109-110 Script Load option, 18
RGB (red/green/blue) color signal, scripts, 16, 22, 165
210, 213-215 linking flies with, 165-171
RGB (red/green/blue) slider bar, loading, 18
84-87 playing, 23
right-clicking, 11 structure of, 22
ROADI.GIF file, 88, 134 writing, 22-24, 171-174
ROAD.FU file, 91 Scroll Across option, 133
Scroll Up option, 133
scrolling text, 133-136
segments, 104, 111-112, 157-159
s Select A Font menu panel,
S-VHS. See Super VHS 125-126
sampling rate, 258-260 Set Brush Size dialog box, 44-45
sans-serif fonts, 12 2 Set Zoom Level menu, 39
Santa Fe Media Manager, 265-266, shapes
269 aligning, 45-47
saturation, 85 transforming, 112-115
Save a Picture? menu panel, 48 shareware, 244
Save Default.fix option, 27 SharpJX-100 scanner, 245
Scale option, 246, 248-249 Sharp LCD video projectors, 221
 Index 303

Shrink option, 175 subdirectories, 275-276

signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), Summasketch MM1201 digitizing
258-259 tablet, 11
Size option,
148,154 SUNBKG.CEL file, 82,87,91
slider bars Super VHS (S-VHS) tape format,
flic, 21 216,218-220,223-225
ink-strength, 37-38 Swap buffer,39-40,43, 64, 103 ,
modifying colors with, 84-87 150-151
optical-effects, 143-145 Swap menu, 42-43
T int option, 83 Swap option (Home menu), 9
snap-to alignment, 45-46 Swap screen. See Swap buffer
snow, 72 sync pulses, 217-218
Soften inking tool, 36,38 System font, 125
Sony Mavica still video camera,
227
Sony video products, 222
T
sound
editing, 261-264 T (T ime) button, 83,89
role of in animation production, Tag Image File Format (TIFF), 181,
101 240,242
storing files of, 261 Targa file f ormat, 181-182,228,
Sound Blaster audio card, 260 246
Spark inking tool, 64 Targa frame grabbers, 228
Special Effects menu, 174-176 Tektronix 4936DX color printer,
Spectrums option, 78 238
Spin option, 148, 154 television. See broadcast
Splice! sound editor, 262-263 television; video recording
Spline drawing tool, 10, 107 terminate-and-stay-resident (T SR)

Spline optical element, 142,151 software, 240

Spray drawing tool, 71 Terravision BBS, 241
Squeeze option, 79 TESTl .GIF file, 48,52,58
Star drawing tool, 54,151 TESTl.PIC file, 47
Still option, 109,133 TEST2.GIF file, 58,83
still video, 227-228 TEST3.GIF file, 83,168
storyboards, 101 text, 119-120. See also fonts
STRATOS scripting language, aligning, 124
268-269 centering, 121-12 2
Stretch option, 5 5-58, 151; consistency in use of, 124
stretching text with, 61-62, embossing, 63-64

113 justifying, 121-122

304 MASTERING ANIMATOR

keeping it simple, 120-121 selecting, 36

legibility of, 121-124 using, 54-56
scrolling, 133-136 Total Frames box, 104-105
stretching, 61-62,113 Trace menu, 10,100
titles, use in, 59-62 Trace option (Home menu), 9
using inking tools for, 128-131 Trade option, 42,63,151
using large f ont sizes in, 118,121 transfo rming shapes, 112-115
Text drawing tool, 59-62,92-93, Transition T ype menu, 165-166,
125,128 168
text files, 16, 22 transitional flies, 169-171
Text Tool menu, 125 Truevision, 182,219,228
textures in ImageCel, 176-178 TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident)
thermal transfer printers, 237 software, 240
T homson Ultrascan monitor, 221 Tween option, 106-108, 114, 151
3/4-inch tape format, 222 tweening, 10,106-108
3-D animation programs, 181 origin of term, 102
3-D color space, 84 using optical effects with,
3-D displays, simulating, 140, 157-159
142-147 2D Shaper module (3D Studio),
3D Editor module (3D Studio), 181, 183
181-182 2TPAT.FLI file, 168
3D L ofter module (3D Studio), T ype On option, 133
181-182
3D Studio, 176,180-185
u
TIFF graphics file format, 181,
240,242 U-matic videotape format, 216,
TIGERCAT.FLI file, 22,27 218,222-224
Tile inking tool, 4 2-44 UFO.FU file, 155
time-base correctors (TBC), UFO.GIF file, 152
217-218,222 Undo option, 26-27, 58
T ime Select menu panel, 90-91, UNPACKl.EXE file, 7
108-110,149 UNPACK2 .EXE file, 7
T ime (T) button, 83,89 Unused Colors option, 76
T int option, 78-79,83,156 Unzag inking tool, 38, 58-59,60
T itling menu panel, 10, 130-136
tools, 8, 35. See also drawing
tools; inking tools v
modifying, 37-38 Value menu, 78-79
replacing, 36 V CRs. See video recording
 Index 305

vector shapes, 106 VGA-to-video products, 85, 208,

venetians, 166, 171 216, 218-220, 276, 281
Ventura Publisher, import/export videodisc recorders, 225
file formats, 240 View option, 43
VGA cards, 4, 210 virtual reality, 142
efficiency of, 281 Vision Technologies, 182, 219,
VGA-to-video conversion, use in, 228
208, 216, 218-220 visual programming, 268
VGA monitors, 4-6, 221 VPIC graphics format translator,
VGA Producer card, 218-219 241
VGA-to-video products, 85, 208,
216, 218-220, 276,281
VGACAP screen capture program, w
244
WALK.GIF file, 79
Vgrad inking tool, 36, 38, 41, 75,
Willow Peripherals, 265
78, 92-93, 115
Windows. See Microsoft Windows
VHS (Video Home Systems) tape
wipe option, 166
format, 222-223. See also
Wireframe option, 149, 154, 156
Super VHS
Word 5.0, import/export file
video
formats, 240
converting VGA to, 218-220
WordPerfect, import/export file
increasing use of, 208-210
formats, 240
overview of, 210-215
Video Associates Labs, 220, 260,
262, 265
x
Video Graphics Array (VGA)
display cards. See VGA cards Xapshot still video camera, 227

video recording, 181-182

animation, of, 4, 215-217
Animator palette file for, 73 y
Animator test pattern for, 85 Y IC connector, 226
audio sources to accompany, Yost, Gary, 225
254-257
editing of, 217-218
high-end, 222-226
products for, 220-229 z
tape formats for, 222-226 Zoom option, 38-39
Selections from
The SYBEX Library

and basics of page design, layout, graph

DESKTOP ics and typography, plus instructions for

PUBLISHING creating finished typeset publications of

all kinds.

The ABC's of the New Print Mastering Ventura for Windows

Shop (For Version 3.0)
Vivian Dubrovin Rick Altman
340pp. Ref. 640-4 600pp, Ref. 758-4
This beginner's guide stresses fun, practi This engaging, hands-on treatment is for
cality and original ideas. Hands-on tutori the desktop publisher learning and using
als show how to create greeting cards, the Windows edition of Ventura. It covers
invitations, signs, flyers, letterheads, ban everything from working with the Win
ners, and calendars. dows interface, to designing and printing
sophisticated publications using Ventura's
The ABC's of Ventura most advanced features. Understand and
Robert Cowart work with frames, graphics, fonts, tables
Steve Cummings and columns, and much more.
390pp. Ref. 537-9
Mastering Ventura 3.0 Gem
Created especially for new desktop pub
lishers, this is an easy introduction to a
Edition
complex program. Cowart provides Matthew Holtz
details on using the mouse, the Ventura 650pp, Ref. 703-7
side bar, and page layout, with careful The complete hands-on guide to desktop
explanations of publishing terminology. publishing with Xerox Ventura Publisher
The new Ventura menus are all carefully now in an up-to-date new edition featuring
explained. For Version 2. Ventura version 3.0, with the GEM win
dowing environment. Tutorials cover
Mastering CorelDRAW! every aspect o f the software, with
Steve Rimmer examples ranging from corresponden ce
403pp. Ref. 685-5 and press releases, to newsletters, techni
cal documents, and more.
This four-color tutorial and user's guide
covers drawing and tracing, text and spe
cial effects, file interchange, and adding Understanding PFS:
new fonts. With in-depth treatment of First Publisher
design principles. For version 1 .1.
Gerry Litton

Mastering PageMaker 310pp. Ref. 616-2

on the IBM PC This complete guide takes users from the

basics all the way through the most com
(Second Edition)
plex features available. Discusses work
Antonia Stacy Jolles ing with text and graphics, columns, clip
384pp. Ref. 521-2 art, and add-on software enhancements.
A guide to every aspect of d es ktop pub Many page layout suggestions are intro
lishing with PageMaker: the vocabulary duced. Includes Fast Track speed notes.
Understanding Postscript CAD
Programming
(Second Edition)
David A. Holzgang
T he ABC's of AutoCAD
472pp. Ref. 566-2
(Second Edition)
In-depth treatment of Postscript for pro
Alan R. Miller
grammers and advanced users working
on custom desktop publishing tasks. 375pp. Ref. 584-0
Hands-on development of programs for This brief but effective introduction to
font creation, integrating graphics, printer AutoCAD quickly gets users drafting and
implementations and more. designing with this complex CADD pack
age. The essential operations and capa
Ventura Instant Reference bilities of AutoCAD are neatly detailed,
SY BEX Prompter Series using a proven, step-by-step method that
is tailored to the results-oriented beginner.
Matthew Holtz
320pp. Ref. 544-1, 4 3/4' x 8"
The ABC's of AutoLISP
This compact volume offers easy access to
George Omura
the complex details of Ventura modes and
300pp. Ref. 620-0
options, commands, side-bars, file manage
ment, output device configuration, and con This book is for users who want to
trol. Written for versions through Ventura 2, it unleash the full power of AutoCAD
also includes standard procedures for pro through the AutoLISP programming lan
ject and job control. guage. In non-technical terms, the reader
is shown how to store point locations,
Ventura Power Tools create new commands, and manipulate
coordinates and text. Packed with tips on
Rick Altman
common coding errors.
318pp. Ref. 592-1
Renowned Ventura expert, Rick Altman, The ABC's of Generic CADD
presents strategies and techniques for the
Alan R. Miller
most efficient use of Ventura Publisher 2.
278pp. Ref. 608-1
This includes a power disk with DOS utili
ties which is specially designed for opti This outstanding guide to computer-aided
mizing Ventura use. Learn how to soup up design and drafting with Generic CADD
Ventura, edit CHP files, avoid design trag assumes no previous experience with
edies, handle very large documents, and computers or CADD. This book will have
improve form. users doing useful GADD work in record
time, including basic drawing with the
Your HP LaserJet Handbook keyboard or a mouse, erasing and
unerasing, making a copy of drawings
Alan R. Neibauer
on your printer, adding text and organiz
564pp. Ref. 618-9
ing your drawings usin g layers.
Get the most from your printer with this
step-by-step instruction book for using Advanced Techniques
LaserJet text and graphics features such
in AutoCAD
as cartridge and soft fonts, type selection,
(Second Edition)
memory and processor enhancements,
PCL programming, and Postscript solu Robert M. Thomas
tions. This hands-on guide provides spe 425pp Ref. 593-X
cific instructions for working with a variety Develop custom applications using
of software. screen menus, command macros, and
AutoLISP programming-no prior pro prehensive tutorial treats each phase of
gramming experience required. Topics project design including drawing, modify
include customizing the AutoCAD envi ing. grouping, and filing. The reader will
ronment, advanced data extraction tech also learn V CAD project management
niques. and much more. and many tips, tricks, and shortcuts. Ver
sion 5.4.
AutoCAD Desktop Companion
SVBEX Ready Reference Serles
Robert M. Thomas
1094pp. Ref. 590-5 OPERATING SYSTEMS
This is a complete reference work cover
ing all the features, commands, and user
options available under AutoCAD The ABC's of DOS 4
Release 10. including drawing basic and Alan A. Miiier
complex entities, editing, displaying, 275pp. Ref. 583-2
printing, plotting, and customizing draw This step-by-step introduction to using
ings, manipulating the drawing database. DOS 4 is written especially for beginners.
and AutoLISP programming. Through Filled with simple examples. The ABC:S of
Release 10. DOS 4 covers the basics of hardware.
software. disks, the system editor EDLIN.
AutoCAD Instant Reference DOS commands, and more.
SVBEX Prompter Serles
George Omura ABC's of MS-DOS
390pp. Ref. 548-4, 4 3/" x 8" (Second Edition)
This pocket-sized reference is a quick Alan A. Miller
guide to all AutoCAD features. Designed 233pp. Ref. 493-3
for easy use, all commands are organized This handy guide to MS-DOS is all many
with exact syntax, a brief description, PC users need to manage their computer
options, tips, and references. Through files, organize floppy and hard disks, use
Release 10. EDLIN, and keep their computers orga
nized. Additional information is given
Mastering AutoCAD Release 11 about utilities like Sidekick. and there is a
George Omura DOS command and program summary.
1150pp, Ref. 716-9 The second edition is fully updated for
Even if you're just beginning, this compre Version 3.3.
hensive guide will help you to become an
AutoCAD expert. Create your first draw DOS Assembly Language
ing, then learn to use dimensions, enter Programming
pre-existing drawings, use advanced 3-D Alan A. Miiier
features, and more. Suitable for experi 365pp. 487-9
enced users, too-includes tips and tricks This book covers PC-DOS through 3.3,
you won't find elsewhere. and gives clear explanations of how to
assemble, link, and debug 8086, 8088,
Mastering VersaCAD 80286, and 80386 programs. The
David Bassett-Parkins example assembly language routines are
450pp. Ref. 617-0 valuable for students and programmers
For every level of VCAD user, this com- alike.
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Goal Method
Drawing Choose a drawing tool in the Home menu panel; if
Objects necessary, replace an unneeded tool with a new
tool by right-clicking on the unneeded tool and
choosing the new tool from the Drawing Tools
menu's scrolling directory.
Applying Choose an inking tool in the Home menu panel; if
Ink necessary, replace an unneeded ink with a new ink
by right-clicking on the unneeded ink and choos
ing the new ink from the Ink Types menu's scroll
ing directory.
Using Files Choose the Files command from the Flic, Pie, or
Cel menu. 'I'hen use the Load, Save, or Delete but
ton in the Files menu panel.
Using Right-click on the flic playback control icons in
Frames any panel, then use the buttons in the Frames
panel to change the number of frames or playback
speed.
Return to Press the spacebar repeatedly.
Home
Modify the Right-dick on the cluster box or on the Current
Palette Color slot.
T itling Choose the T itling option in the Animator menu.
Activating Select the T button in any panel.
Time
Optics Press the 0 key or select Optics from the Animator
menu.
Color Use the Cycle Draw option in the Palette menu or
Cycling the Cycle option in the Arrange menu.
Tweening Use the Tweening Options menus found under the
Poly and Spline tools.