- M.A.A.D. P R E S E N T S - ZOETHROPE THE ANIMATION SYSTEM TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 QUICK START 7 Getting Started 9 ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW 9 Getting the Basics Out of the Way 11 Playing an Animation 13 Automatic Animation 15 Doin' the APM 17 Put It All Together 19 Moving On 21 ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING 21 The Draw Menu 25 The Modes Menu 27 The Brush Menu 29 The Color Menu 34 Using Text 35 The Clip Menu 43 The Frame Menu 44 The Load/Save Menu 47 ZOETROPE TUTORIAL III: CEL ANIMATION 49 A Simple Animation 52 Blueing and Changes 59 Compositing 64 Tweening 67 ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X 68 Turns 70 Axis Operations 71 Center 72 Size 73 Move 74 The Path Options 75 First and Motion 76 Clip and Sequence 79 ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR V/X 79 Multiple Pallettes 81 Color f/x --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 98 ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X & MATTE 87 Pixel f/x 91 Matte 93 ZOETROPE REFERENCE SECTION 94 The Playback Bar 98 The Main Menu 98 Menu 98 About ZOETROPE 98 Time 102 Load/Save 108 The Zoetrope File Selector 111 Matte 114 Set Font 114 Air Speed 115 Status 115 Pixel f/x 119 APM f/x 128 Kill Seq 128 Pause 128 Quit 128 Clip 129 Cut 129 Paste 130 Paste Below 130 Move 131 Clip 131 Rotate 133 Stretch 135 Invert 136 Fit Colors 136 Mask 137 Draw 137 Draw 137 Streak 137 Stipple 138 Airbrush 138 Fill 138 Line 138 Polygon 139 Circle 140 Box --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 141 Text 142 Modes 142 Zoom 143 Ping Pong 143 Xray Copy 143 Filled 144 Distinct 144 Connected 144 Concentric 144 Frame 144 Undo 145 Restore 145 Separate 145 Separate Many 146 Blue Pic 146 Unblue Pic 146 Next Blue 147 History Pic 147 Unhistory Pic 148 Get Changes 148 Next Changes 148 Clear Pic 148 Delete 149 Flip 5 149 Brush 149 Get Brush 150 Use Clip 150 Color 151 Cycle 152 Palette 156 Color f/x I Appendix A: MEMORY CONSERVATION III Appendix B: ZOEPLAY & QUICKRIF VII Appendix C: FILE FORMATS & CONVERSIONS XI Appendix D: SOFTWARE ETHICS Bibliograhy INDEX page 1 ---------------------------------------------QUICK START QUICK START For the those adventurous souls who shun documentation, and want to lunge blindly into their brand-new software, we present the ZOETROE Quick Start. ZOETROE has far too many functions to learn in a coule of pages. But we can give you a taste of its power. The following instructions assume you've used plenty of Amiga software and know what terms lick click, double-click, and drag mean. We assume you've used menu bars, and you know what to do when you see: "Choose Fill from the Draw menu." But if you get lost, don't worry about it. ZOETROPE can be learned quickly and enjoyably by sitting down with the program and working your way through the tutorials following this section. You can always come back and visit later on. Decided to try this anyway? Okay, make copies of both ZOETROPE disks. Now, place disk A (the main disk) in your drive, open its window, and double-click on the ZOETROPE icon. When the blank screen comes up, replace ZOETROPE disk A with ZOETROPE disk B (the data disk). PREPARATION Before plunging into the unknown, it's always a good idea to plan a path of retreat. The right mouse button (or [space bar]), will back up from where you are. It will also toggle between the full screen and the menu display. You can only draw on the ZOETROPE screen when there are no menus displayed. If you try something and it doesn't work, click the right mouse button and try it again. If it still doesn't work - read the documentation. page 2 ------------------------------------------------QUICK START note: In the following Quick Start section, we won't tell you to right-click to exit the menus. But if you have to be somewhere else on screen, you may have to leave the menu you're in to get there. * Exit ZOETROPE by selecting Quit from the Menu drop-down * The [Help] key will undo mistakes * If you get lost, here's how to clean up and return to default settings: CLEAN-UP 1. Select Kill Seq from Menu, and click on Yes. 2. Select Time from Menu, click on To Frame, make sure Tween is highlighted. 3. Select APM f/x from Menu, select Clear, click on Yes. 4. Select Color f/x from Color, drag the line beneath the color squares so that it spans all the colors, click on (and highlight) f/x and Normal, then select Render. 5. Select Load/Save from Menu, click on and highlight Normal and .rif. 6. Deselect Ping ong in Modes menu (no asterick). You could also accomplish all of the above by exiting to the Workbench then restarting the program. But then you would never learn. Again, the following instructions are bare-bone and assume you know how to select an item from the menu bar, how to exit a submenu, and how to activate the full screen when you want to draw (all done with the right mouse button). TEXT & APM You've just booted. A blank screen with a cross-shape cursor appears. * Select Set Font from Menu * Click to select a nice fat font from the window. (Drag the slider bar at the left to view more fonts). * Select Text from Draw Menu. * Select red color from Color menu. * From full screen, left-click to set cursor somewhere left of center. * Type your name on screen (first name will do). * Right click to exit text mode. * Select a contrasting color from the Color menu. * Select Pixel f/x from Menu. * Select Edge In, the click on the black background. * Select Clip from Clip menu. * Select Clear ic from Frame menu. page 3 -------------------------------------------------------QUICK START * Press [Return] twice (creates 21 frames). * Select APM f/x from Menu. * Click on lower-case 'f' at right until it is a red, lower-case 'a' (To All frames). * Adjust the full Turns slide bar (the lower one) to read l. * Click on Center, then Default. * Click on Axis, drag the top bar to the right (100), second bar to the left (-100), third bar to the right (100). * Click on Preview. * Select Size and Scale, drag Enlarge bar to 50 (Scale reads 2.00). * Click on Preview. * Select Path, click on Samle Path, drag a squiggly line on screen. (Release button to comlete ath). * Click on review. Reeat Path, above, until you like it. * Select Render, answer Yes (or press [Y]). * Select ing Pong from Modes menu. * Press [F8] to play the animation. PIXEL F/X * Use Clean Up sequence, above, to return ot default settings. * Select Load/Save from menu. * Click on Load, select the FOREMAN.RIF file from selector box. * After the file loads, return to full screen, and press [F8] to play. * Select Time from Menu, click and highlight To All. * Select the green color from the Color menu (first column, second from bottom). * Select ixel f/x from Menu, select Edge In, left-click in black background, answer Yes. * Play animation: [F8]. * From Pixel f/x menu, select Outline, answer Yes, play animation. * From Pixel f/x menu, select Rile. Drag box 20 by 20 ppixels (ignore numbers in aprentheses), release button, answer yes, play animation. * From ixel f/x menu, select Tile. Drag the box around the man's head, answer Yes, play animation. * Select Time from Menu, click and highlight To Frame. Press [F10] to move to last frame (#12). * Select color f/x from Color menu. Drag both ends of the line under the color bars to encompass all colors. Select Chrone, click on Render. * Click on Fade, and highlight Blend. Click on lower-case 'f' until it is a red 'a' (To All Frames). * Click on Render, answer Yes, play animation. page 4 ------------------------------------------------------QUICK START CRYSTALIZE * Use Clean Up sequence to return to default settings. * Press [Return] four times (41 frames). * Turn off Filled in Modes menu (no asterick). * Select color # 16 from Color menu (fifth down in the first column). * Select Box in the Draw menu and draw a three-inch box in center of screen. * Select color # 31 from Color menu (lower-right). * Select the second brush on the top row of the Brush menu. * Select Draw in Draw menu. Click once in the center of the box to place a brush-shaped dot. * Select Time from Menu, click to highlight To All. * Select Pixel f/x from Menu, select Crystalize, answer Yes. * Select Ping Pong in Modes menu. Play the animation. NOTE: One-megabyte machines may run out of memory using certain procedures. Try booting your system with no disk in the external drive. See Appendix A for memory saving tips. ------------page 5 & page 6 are examples of screens------------------ page 7 ------------------------------------------------GETTING STARTED The ZOETROPE manual id divided into two main sections: Tutorial and Reference. The several tutorials in the first section provide hands- on introductions to ZOETROPE's features; the Reference Section contains all ZOETROPE features organized by screen-menu location for easy look-up. At the end of the manual are several appendices covering miscellaneous information. BEFORE YOU BEGIN, BACK UP YOUR DISKS! Both ZOETROPE disks may be copied using the disk copy procedure described in your Amiga owner's manual. Please back them up and store the originals in a safe place. Throughout the manual, when we refer to the ZOETROPE disks, we willbe referring to the back-up copies. There may be one or more files on your disks titled README. These contain important information you should read before running any program. Your ZOETROPE package should contain two disks: ZOETROPE Main (disk A), and ZOETROPE Data (disk B). ZOETROPE Main contains the ZOETROPE program itself which is the only file needed to operate ZOETROPE. The remaining files and directories contain utilities and fonts. Any operable programs besides ZOETROPE are described in the appendices at the end of this manual. ZOETROPE Data (disk B) contains the data files used by the ZOETROPE tutorial section plua additional graphics demos. You may move all files from both disks into a hard disk if you have one. During the tutorials, we will refer to the disk containing the tutorial files as the ZOETROPE data disk, or disk B. page 8---------------------------------------------------GETTING STARTED While your'e copying disks, we suggest formatting a coule of disks to store your animation sequences. Now, place your copy of ZOETROE in whichever drive you wish to run it from, open that drive's window, and double-click on the ZOETROPE icon. NOTE: ZOETROPE requires a minimum of one-megabyte of RAM, and oerates in the Amiga low-resolution graphics mode. If you have a one-megabyte system, we recomend booting your system without the external drive to save memory. page 9 ----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW ZOETROPE is many programs in one, but it is essentially an animation program. It is also a delta-file editor, as well as a paint program. It's closest relatives may be found among the high-end grahpics workstations that create many of the titling animations you see on such programs as the TV news, or sports programs. Depending on what you want to ut into it, ZEOTROPE can be powerful, complex, or very simple. It's also a lot of fun. This first tutorial will quickly introduce the heart of the ZOETROPE system without getting bogged down in a lot of details. The succeeding tutorials are designed to lead you through every feature of ZOETROPE until you feel comfortable and familiar with its functions. NOTE: The following section assumes a cleared ZOETROPE system. If you're coming here directly from the Quick Start section, above, use the Clean-Up procedure, or reboot ZOETROPE. GETTING THE BASICS OUT OF THE WAY When you first enter ZOETROPE, a blank screen appears. Move the mouse and a hollow, white cross appears as your mouse cursor. MOUSE RULES: * The right mouse button is used to escape from where you are. * The left mouse butotn is used for all else. Naturally, there is an excetion to the first rule: The right mouse button is also used to access the top menu bar. Hold down the right mouse button to display the menu bar, then run it over the various titles to dislay their menus. While still holding down the button, place the cursor over the item you wish (a red box will outline it), then page 10 ----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW release the right mouse button to select that item. If you move the mouse pointer away from the menu before releasing the button, no action will be taken. In this manual, when you see a hrase like "Select Circle from the Draw menu", it means to use the above procedure to find the item labeled "Circle" in the menu titled "Draw", and select it by releasing the right mouse button while "Circle" is outlined. NOTE: The letters you see to the right of the menu selections are keyboard alternatives. These can speed things considerablyonce you get used to ZOETROPE, but to begin with, the handiest keyboard alternatives are [Space Bar]=right mouse button, [Help]=Undo, and [Esc]=Clear Pic. Examples of Mouse Rule # 1: Click the right mouse button and a bar appears at the bottom of the screen (the Playback Bar). Right-click again to 'escape' from this bar. Using the procedure described above, select Load/Save from the Menu. After the Load/Save menu appears, press the right mouse button to 'escape' from the Load/Save menu. An example of Mouse Rule # 2: Select Circle from the Draw menu, place your mouse cursor in the center of the screen, hold down the left mouse button, and move the mouse away from the center to create a circle. Release the button to leave the circle. Select Undo from the Frame menu to undo the circle. (Try drawing the circle with the Playback Bar displayed. Doesn't work. Remember: You can only draw on a full screen with no menus displayed. page 11 ----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW PLAYING AN ANIMATION ZOETROPE animation files are called 'rif' files, after the rif delta file format developed by author Jim Kent. Select Load/Save from Menu. There are five file types, indicated by their extender names, which are directly accessible by ZOETROPE. When you first access the Load/Save menu, the .rif extender is already highlighted. To load a rif file, click on Load. NOTE: Special file conversion utilities are included on your ZOETROPE disk to convert animation files from other pgorams to the rif format. See Appendix C for details. The ZOETROPE file selector appears, displaying a list of rif files from whichever disk or drawer you booted ZOETROPE. We want to load an animation called DINO.RIF, which is on Disk B of your ZOETROPE disks. If you have two disk drives and have placed Disk B in DF1:, click in the DF1: box of the file selector to display the files on that drive. If youhave one disk drive, replace ZOETROPE Disk A with ZOETROPE Disk B, then click on DF0: to relist the files on the new disk. (Hard disk owners: the names of your first five hard disk partitions will also appear in buttons on your file selector). You can scoll u and down the list of files by clicking on the arrows to the left of the file window, or by dragging the slider bar. DINO.RIF page 12 ----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW will be found inthe drawer labeled TUTORIALS. Click on the drawer name in the file window to list the files inside. To load DINO.RIF, either left-clickon the file name then click on OK, or double-click onthe file name. An arrogant dragon will appear, strolling in the center of your screen. (Dino is a character from an animation by Doug Thomas). The animation will appear jerky because ZOETROPE is displaying each frame as it is loaded from the disk. Once the load is comleted, click the right mouse button to remove the Load/Save menu. You should now have a dragon on your screen, and the Playback Bar at the bottom. (If the Playback Bar is not there, right- click to make it appear). The Playback Bar works a lot like a VCR controller. right now, your ZOETROPE screen is displaying frame # 1 (indicated by the slider bar), out of a total of eight frames of naimation (as shown at the right of the Playback Bar). To play the DINO animation, click on the plain, right- facing arrow (three boxes to the right of the slider bar). Right-click to halt the animation. Select zoom in the Modes menu, place the box over the dragon and left-click. Now lay the animation. Select Zoom again to return to a normal screen. You can try out all the other icons in the layback Bar but, for now, avoid clicking on the total-frames number (8), the 'f' to its right, and the two 'non-arrow' icons that are two boxes to the right and to the left of the slider bar. If you accidentally click on these, you can restore the original animation by simple reloading it. But go ahead and try out the other buttons. They're all logical enough. You can also move anywhere in the animation by clicking within the slider bar, or dragging the frame number in the slider bar. Now let's try the boses we avoided. (If you've already clicked on them and altered the animation, now's the time to reload the original DINO.RIF. Move to frame # 5 of the animation, then click on the icon that's two boxes ot the right of the slider bar. The slider number becomes a six, and the total frames number increases to nine. The icon you just page 13 ----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW clicked on inserts one copy of the displayed frame at that position in the animation, and moves the slider bar to the right one frame. Frames # 5 and # 6 are now idential copies. Play back the animation and note the hesitation caused by the duplicate frames. To get rid of the extra frame, move to frame #6 or #6, select Delete from the Frame menu, and click on Yes. The duplicate frame is removed, and the animation is back ot a smooth eight frames. The icon two boxes left of the slider barr performs the identical function, except that the slider bar moves to the left of the inserted frame. How's your animation? Still looking good? If not, reload the original DINO.RIF before continuing. AUTOMATIC ANIMATION Many of ZOETROPE's functions may be applied differently over a range of frames to automaticallyi create animation effects. Move to frame #1 and select Cut from the Clip menu. Move the cross hairs that appear just above and to the left of Dino, then drag the mouse (hold down the left moust button) to create a box around the dinosaur before releasing the button. The box disappears, but you've captured the image in the ZOETROPE clip buffer. Select Paste from the Clip menu and drag Dino to the upper left of the screen before releasing the button to paste him there. Take a look at some of the other frames to see that he's only been pasted to frame #1. Now we'll do some Time Painting. Select Time from the Menu. Click on To All to highlight it, then right-click to return to whichever frame you're on (it doesn't matter). Notice that the small 'f' in the Playback Bar has been replaced by a while 'a' against a red background. page 14-----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW Again, select Paste from the Clip menu. This time, drag Dino to the lower right of the screen before releasing the button. A requestor asks if you want to do this to all frames. Sure, why not. Click on Yes. When ZOETROPE finishes pasting to all frames, play the animation. Select Time again from the menu, and click on Tween to turn off the tweening function. Exit the Time menu, select Paste from the Clip menu, drag Dino to the lower left, and answer Yes to the prompt. Play the animation. Return to the Time menu, turn Tween back on (highlighted), then select To Segment. In the box below To Segment, drag the dot to the right until it becomes a bar (the Segment Range Bar). Drag the end of the bar until the number to its right indicates frame #6. Drag the other end of the bar until its number (the one to the left) indicates frame #3. Drag-Paste Dino one more time, then play the animation. Notice that while in To Segment mode (note the 's' in the Playback Bar), ZOETROPE plays only the segment of frames indicated by the Segment Range Bar. The frame mode must be in either To Frame or To All for full playback of all frames. Stop the pplayback and click on the 's' to change the frame mode To All (each click on the frame-mode box cycles the mode through 'f', 's', and 'a'). Now, when the entire animation is played, you can see that the newly pasted image appears only through frames #3-#6. Let's get rid ofthe clutter. Click on the frame mode letter ('a') to set it To Frame ('f'). Select Kill Seq from the Menu and answer 'Yes' to clear all frames from memory. The Playback Bar shows you have a single frame. Click once on the frame-total number in the Playback Bar to append ten duplicate frames to your animation (in this case, a total of 11 blank frames). This is a shortcut method of adding extra frames. Whenever you click on the total frames number (or press [Return] ten additional frames will be added to the end of the animation. You've erased the Dino animation, but your clip buffer still contains his image. Select Move from the Clip menu, move Dino to the middle of the screen and release the button. Move works just like Paste - except that it doesn't paste. It simply moves the clip image to another location. Move is also handy for viewing the contents of your clip buffer. It's also a good way to try out the different ways of dragging an image around. Go ahead and move Dino around the screen. Notice that page 15-----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW you can place the mouse pointer anywhere on screen to begin the drag move - you can even move Dino completely off the screen! (Don't forget where you ut him.) When you're through, move him back to center screen. Set the frame mode To All and select Rotate from the Clip menu. Place the cursor just outside thelower-right corner of the clip box, hold down the left button, and drag in a counter-clockwise direction about 180 degrees. Release the left mouse button, then right-click, answer Yes to the prompt, and play the animation. Again, select Rotate from the Clip menu. Place the pointer inside the clip box and drag Dino to the lower left corner of the screen. Place the pointer just outside the right side of the clip box and drag it counterclockwise to about 180 degrees before releasing it. Note that at this point, you may still drag the clip image from inside its box, or try a slightly different rotation. When you're ready, right-click, then play back the animation. Many of the clip functions vary, depending on where you place the mouse pointer in relation to the clip box. These are all described in detail in the following tutorials, and in the Reference section. Choose Stretch from the Clip menu, place the pointer inside the clip box and drag Dino to the upper center of the screen. Place the pointer outside the right side of the clip box and drag the box to the right to stretch the image. Right click, answer affirmative, then watch the animation. Select ing Pong from the Modes menu and play the animation again. DOIN' THE APM As we have demonstrated, by using the Clip functions over a range of frames, you can rotate, stretch, and move (using Paste) your images. With the APM f/x menu, you can combine these operations - and more. Move Dino to the upper left corner of the screen, then select APM f/x from the Menu. First we'll try a rotation. At boot-up, 'Turn' and 'Turns' are already highlighted in the APM menu. (If they're not, click on Turn, then on Turns.) To the right of Turns are two slider bars. page 16---------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW The top slider adjusts partial turns (+-360 degrees), and the bottom adjusts full turns +-16). Adjust the lower bar for one full turn, counter-clockwise (positive number) by clicking on arrow to its right. Now, click on the box labeled Preview to see the effect. (You may click on Preview as many times as you wish, it has no effect on your animation). During the review, the white cross on the screen indicates the center of rotation. To move it, click on Center, then select Mouse XY and move the crosshairs to the lower-right corner of the clip box (approximately). Left-click to set the center, then click on Preview to view the results. Now, click on Default and preview the results. Default automatically places the cross in the center of the clip box. The clip box has been rotating about the Z axis. (The Z axis is the depth axis running through the screen from your eyes. The X axis is a horizontal line parallel to the screen, and the Y axis is a vertical line.) Click on Axis, then click on X and preview the turn. Click on Y and preview the turn. The three slider bars above X,Y, and Z represent the placement of (from top to bottom) the X, Y, and Z axes. Drag the upper slider bar all the way to the left (-100), leave the middle slider bar at 100, and drag the lower slider bar all the way to the left (-100). Click on preview. Now that we have an interesting rotation, let's add movement across the screen. There are two ways to move an image from the APM. We'll use Path for this example. Click on Path, then click on Sampled Path. Point at Dino, hold down the left mouse button and drag a looping path that ends near the lower-right of the screen. Preview the result. (You can keep redoing the path until it moves the way you want it). page 17---------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW Now we'll add scaling to our rotating, moving image. Select Size and drag the lower bar (labeled Enlarge) until it reads approximately 50, and the percentage under Scale reads about 2.00. (Exact values are not always possible, depending on the size of clip buffer.) Click on Preview. Finally, click on Render, then click on Yes. ZOETROPE will take care of the rest. When the rendering is complete, play back the results. This is the basic process of the APM. Up until the time you select Render, you may continue to adjust any of the APM functions, repreviewing until you get what you like. PUT IT ALL TOGETHER Now that we've done some animation doodling, let's see if we can put some of these features to use. What if we wanted Dino to walk across the screen? Select Kill Seq from the Menu, answer Yes, then select Load/Save from the menu and reload the original DINO.RIF animation. Return to the APM f/x menu and click on Preview. All our original settings are still there, and the clib box floats across the screen. Up until now, we've moved a clip image all over the screen, but it hasn't been animated. Now, we want Dino to walk across the screen. In the lower-left corner of the APM f/x menu is the word Clip. Click on it to toggle it to Seq. Now, the APM settings will affect the entire animation sequence. Click on Preview. Oops, we don't want Dino flying all over! Click on Clear and answer Yes to the prompt. The Clear button erases, or zeroes, all previous APM settings. (But don't worry, you can save your APM settings to disk from the Load/Save menu.) Dino is going to walk from the left side of the screen to half way off the right. To place him at his starting position, click on Move (the Move in the APM menu!) and select Mouse XY. Drag Dino (and the entire screen) all the way to the left until his tail is about one-half inch away from the left edge of the screen. Note the coordinates at the top of the screen. The dy coordinate stands for 'delta y', or the change from the original Y coordinate position. Make sure this reads zero before you release the mouse button. When the APM menu returns, note the page 18---------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW values in the slider bars. The top bar (X position)reflects the change on the X axis (about -100). The Y and Z bars should both read zero. If you accidentally joggled the mouse before releasing it, you can adjust the Y axis to zero in the slider bar. Click on Preview. The entire screen glides to the left. Hmmmm... Looks like this won't work, he'll be walking backwards. Click on the 't' (tween) to turn it off, and try review again. That's better. Withot tween, only the final position of the sequence (or clip) is pasted identially to each frame. Click on Render and check out the results. Dino should now be walking at the left of the screen. Now, let's walk Dino across the screen. Click on Move in the APM menu and drag Dino to the right until he's halfway off the screen (and the Y delta remains at dy()). This should be approximately dx256. Click on Preview - oops, forgot to turn the tween back on. Click on 't' to highlight tween, then preview again. The sequence box should glide across the screen. Go ahead and render it. Turn off the Ping Pong in the Modes smenu before playing the animation. Not bad! All we need now is a background. Select Load/Save from the Menu. We want to load a background picture, so select .pic as the type of file. If we loaded a picture with the settings as they are, it would replace the frame in memory. (Actually, it would replace all frames since the frame mode is set To All.) For our example, though, we want a background under Dino. So, click on Under. NOTE: File merges using Under and Over begin loading at the frame currently displayed. In the following examples, make sure you are at frame #1 before loading Under or Over. Now, click on Load. Since you're in To All mode, any kind of file I/O is irreversable and a prompt will warn you. Answer Yes. The file selector will now display only those files with a .pic extender. (If you want to display all files, click on the word Wildcard. To return to the .pic extender, click on Wildcard again.) Select and load the file labeled DINO.PIC. Your background picture will be loaded into each frame behind the Dino animation. page 19-----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW Play the animation. Looks pretty good, but let's add one more touch. It's just as easy to merge (or 'composite') animations as it is to composite pictures. Reenter the Load/Save menu, select .rif, then click on Over. Now, click on Load and select the file DINOTITLE.RIF. When the first frame of the animation appears, it will wait for you to position it. If you liked where it was, you could simply click the right mouse button. This animation is a credit title which might look better at the bottom of the screen, so drag it to the lower ortion of the screen before releasing the button. Answer yes to the rompt and, when the loading is comleted, play your comleted animation. It's easy to save your comleted dnimation (and it's a good idea to save many interim animations before activating irreversable functions. Place a blank, formatted disk in whichever drive is available. If you have a single drive, replace ZOETROPE disk B with the formatted disk. NOTE: No disk formatted? Select Pause from the Menu to return to the Workbench. Select Load/Save, make sure .rif is highlighted (we want to save the animation, not just a single frame picture.) During a Save operation, the Normal, Over, Under, and Splice modes don't matter, but make sure the frame mode is set either To All, or To Frame. Click on Save. Point to the box to right of the word 'File:' and click to get a square cursor. Type in a file name, such as: DINOALL.RIF, and press [Return]. ZOETROPE will display each frame of the animation as it saves it to disk. MOVING ON Before you move on, play around with what you have already learned. Experiment and try new combinations. This tutorial has been only an introduction to ZOETROPE. Whole menus - such as ixel f/x and Color f/x - have not even been mentioned. The remaining tutorials use a more methodical approach, taking you step-by-step through all of ZOETROPS's functions: TUTORIAL II: DRAWING, will show you how to use ZOETROPE's paint- rogram features - the backbone of the program. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- page 20 ZOETROPE TUTORIAL I: AN OVERVIEW PAGE 20 WAS MISSING - COULDN'T TYPE IN (blank?). page 21--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING ZOETHROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Before beginning this tutorial, make afresh start by using the Clean Up procedure inthe Quick Start section, or by simply Quitting ZOETROPE (select Quit in the Menu), and restarting it from the Workbench. You should now be looking at the familiar cross-shaped cursor inthe middle of the ZOETROPE screen. NOTE: During the following tutorial, watch that the frame mode in the Playback Bar remains at Toi Frame ('f'). If the red 's' or 'a' appears, click on it to return to the 'f'. Also, the total frames number (at the right) should remain at '1'. If you see a higher number while working in the earlier tutorials, it means you've accidentally pressed [Return]. To clear this up, select Kill Seq from the Menu, then select 'Yes' from the requestor box. THE DRAW MENU In order to create your own cel animation or 'dress up' existing animations with ZOETROPE, you should first familiarize yourself with the many aint tools you have at hand. page 22-----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Examine the contents of the Draw menu. There are nine drawing functions (or tools), one text option, and their keyboard equivalents. An asterick (*) to the left of any one of the features will indicate the currently selected one. Only one item in the Draw menu may be active at any time. When you first boot ZOETROEP, the Draw tool is active and the mouse cursor is a one-pixel-sized, cross-shaped brush. With the Draw tool selected, move the cursor to the middle of the screen, hold down the left button and move the mouse around. If nothing happens, it is because the Playback bar is still displayed at the bottom of the screen. Right-click to display a full screen, then hold down the left button and move the mouse: a one-pixel-wide line is drawn. Play around with the Draw function a bit. Draw quickly or slowly; sign your name, if you want. Try this: Scribble a line, then press [Help] - the line is gone. Press [Help] again - the line reappears. Draw a second line, then a third line, then press [Help] - only the third line is removed. The [Help] key is the alternative to selecting Undo in the Frame menu. It works with most of ZOETROPE's functions, but you may only Undo the last operation. If you go on the a second operation, the previous one is permanently set. (There is an exception to this, which we will get to later.) Select Streak from the Draw menu and scibble some more on the screen. Streak is similar to Draw, but if you move your mouse quickly across the screen you'll see the difference. Streak lets you draw with a brush designed to 'skip' if you are drawing quickly. This creates a sketchy appearance. Now, select Stipple from the Draw menu, and then go back to your workscreen. Go to a clear area of your screen, hold down your left mouse button and move your cursor around. Stipple sprays a randomly-distributed series of individual pixels in a small swatch. (It will also use whichever brush you've selected from the Brush menu. We'll cover that in a bit.) We'll be getting to color in a little while, but let's sneak ahead and change the color of our Stipple brush. Move the mouse to the Color menu. When it drops down, you will see the 32 default ZOETROPE colors, plus some options at the bottom. To select a new color for your page 23-------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING current drawing tool, simply point the mouse cursor at the block containing the color you wish. An outline will surround the selected color. Release the right mouse button to select the color, then try the Stipple again. NOTE: There's a hidden way to select colors directly from the screen. Place your mouse cursor over any color on the workscreen and ress the [C] key. This will select whichever color your mouse is point at. Now you can change colors at any time while continuing with the drawing tutorial. But by now, your workscreen is probably getting a little cluttered. To erase it, select Clear ic from the Frame menu. Your workscreen is cleared of all previous work. Press [Hel] and everything returns. The keyboard alternative to Clear Pic is [Esc], press it and your screen is blanked again. Select Airbrush from the Draw menu and try it out. Airbrush is similar to Stipple except that it is adjustable. You can set both the speed and the spread (range) of your airbrush. Select Air Speed from the Menu. A menu box appears consisting of two slider boxes labeled Speed and Spread. Speed affects the overall speed of your airbrush flow, while Spread alters the range of screen area covered by your pixels (or brushes). You can adjust the slider bar values by one increment in either direction biy clicking on the arrows to either side of the bar. Hold down the left button while pointing on the arrow, and the slider bar will begin to scroll. Click anywhere within the slider area to move the slider bar immediatelyi to that position - or, simly drag the slider bar to the osition you wish. NOTE: There are several slider bars used in the various menus of ZOETROPE. They all work in the fashion described above. Take the time now to familiarize yourself with their operation. After your airbrush speed and sread values, right-click to return to the main menu screen and draw with the airbrush. Readjust the Air Speed settings as often as you like until you have a feel for exactly how they affect your airbrush. page 24----------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Clear your screen when you're finished (select Clear Pic from the Frame menu, or press [Esc]. Now, select Draw again from the Draw menu, and scribble several overlapping, looping circles on your screen. Return to the Draw menu and select Fill - a hollow cursor labeled 'Fill' will apear on your workscreen. Place the center of the cursor inside one of the enclosed areas you just drew (or whatever area you want filled), and press the left mouse button. You'll see a solid color expand and fill that area. Choose different colors and fill every enclosed area you want, or even fill the entire screen. Try pressing [Help] to see if you can undo a fill. Clear your workscreen and select Line from the Draw menu. Place the center of the cursor at the point where you want the line to start, then click and hold your left mouse button. While still holding down the button, move your cursor around on the screen. A rubber line will stretch from your starting point. Move your cursor to the point where you want the line to end, then release the button to set it. Repeat the above procedure to draw more lines. Select Polygon from the Draw menu. Polygon lets you create straight- edged geometric shaes of any color - squares, rectanges, trapezoids. Place your cursor at any point on the screen, left-click once, then move the cursor. A rubber line appears. Left-click a second point and move the cursor again. As you move your cursor away from its second position, a swath of color emanates from your initial starting oint, sweeping out to your cursor in a triangular shape. Click and move again. If you double back over your shape, you will reveal the original background under the polygon. Right-click to release the mouse and set the final polygon. Clear your workscreen and select Circle from the Draw menu. Place your cursor at the sot on the workscreen where you want the center of your circle. Hold down theleft mouse button and move the cursor outward from the centeroint. Release the button to set the circle. Select a different color and try it again. Choose a distinct color, and select Box from the Draw menu. Position your cursor on the workscreen, hold down the left mouse button, then drag your cursor. As you move it away, in any direction, you'll see a box, with right-angled sides, emanating from your starting oint. You can move the cursor in any direction to make the box assmall or large as you want. Release the mouse button to set your box. page 25-------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Before we discuss Text, the last item in the Draw menu, let's explore some of the other features in ZOETROPE that affect your drawing functions. THE MODES MENU Point to the Modes menu and examine its list of functions. The items in the Modes menu affect the various drawing tools and, unlike the items in the Draw menu, more than one of the Modes may be active at any time. There are seven items, but for now, we're with only five of them. If your screen is empty, draw something simple then select Zoom from the Modes menu. A white box will appear. Move the mouse to place thebox in the area you want work, then click the left mouse button. Your workscreen now displays a magnified version of the area you chose. The keyboard alternative to Zoom is [Z], and is easier to use than selecting from the menu. Press [Z], and your workscreen returns to normal. Press [Z] again, and the white box reappears. Click the left mouse button to return to Zoom mode on the workscreen. You can pick and use any of your ZOETROPE drawing functions (Draw, Line, Airbrush, etc). Use [Z] to toggle between Zoom and normal display mode. Make fine adjustments to your drawing; add details to your stick figure's face, if you want. If you're doing detail work on an area of your painting, and find that toggling in and out of Zoom is disruptive, you can move the Zoom window by pressing the number keyson your numeric keypad (to the far right of your keyboard). The eight number keys surrounding the [5] key will move the Zoom window in the compass direction of that page 26--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING particular key from the central [5] key. For example, the [8] key is north of the [5]. Press [8] and watch the Zoom window move upward. Press [4] and the zoom window moves to the left (or west). Those keys diagonal to the [5] key will move the window in a diagonal direction. ress [3] to move the window down and to the right (south- east). See Zoom in the Reference Section for a detailed description of the numeric keypad function.) Okay, turn zoom off and take another look at the Modes menu. We'll skip Ping Pong and X-Ray Copy for now. Let's examine Filled. Filled in the Modes menu is different from Fill in the Draw menu. At boot-up, Filled is active (as you can see bythe asterick). This means that drawing tools, such as Box circle, and Polygon, automatically create solid images. When you turn Filled off, these same functions will create hollow images. Let's try it. Select Filled to toggle it off. Now try the Circle, Box, and Polygon functions that you used earlier from the Draw menu. You will readily see the effect of an inactive Filled mode. Toggle Filled back on and draw some more. Leave Filled active, and clear your screen before proceeding. The three features at the bottom of the Modes menu (Distinct, Connected, and Concentric) are slightly different from the other options in the menu in that only one of them may be active at any time, and at least one of them must be active. These three modes affect the Circle, Line, and Box drawing tools only. We've seen how these tools function in Distinct mode, let's examine the others. Select Connected, then draw several boxes and circles. As you can see, when Connected is activated, it takes the starting and ending points of your cursor and draws a circle, or box between them. The Line tool follows the same rule, but the mouse buttons are used a bit differently; left-click just once to set the starting point of the line, then left-click again to set the end point of that line. Your cursor will remain attached to each set point by a rubber line. Continue to move and left-click to draw connected lines about the screen. To remove your cursor from the series of lines, click the right mouse button. You can now left-click to set the oint on another series of lines. Now, go back to the Modes menu and select Concentric. When Concentric is activated, the first point that you set, by left-clicking, page 27--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING becomes the center point of all subsequent oerations, until you right- click to clear the set point. Before trying Concentric, click on Filled to deactivate it. This will make the Concentric effect more noticeable. Select Box or Circle from the Draw menu, go to youur workscreen, press the left button to place your center oint, and drag the cursor outwards. You'll see the box or circle appear. Release the mouse button to set the image, move the cursor elsewhere on your screen, then drag to create another Box or Circle. Concentric will remember your original centerpoint and automatically draw a new box or circle, radiating outward from the original centerpoint to your new cursor position. Right-click to release the current center oint and set another, or to select a different tool. The Line function works as a 'ray' tool in Concentric mode. Select Line and left-click only once to create a center point. Move the mouse away, and a rubber line will emanate from the center oint. Left-click to set the line, then move the mouse. The rubber line remains attached to the center oint. Left-click to set several 'ray' lines. Now, try this: hold down the left mouse button and swee the mouse in a circle around the center oint to make spike dandelion-shaped images. Right-click to release the center point. Now, select Distinct to turn it back on. We're going to do some more drawing, but this time, we're going to change our brush. THE BRUSH MENU ZOETROE has an array of brushes you may select for most drawing functions, or you may define your own brush. Move your mouse to the Brush menu and look at the menu. You'll notice an assortment of page 28------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING 16 brushes of various shapes and sizes, along with a couple of options at the bottom of the menu, which we'll describe in a moment. Go back to the Draw menu and select the draw tool. Now, from the Brush menu, select any one ofthe brush shapes. The mouse cursor becomes the shape of the chosen brush. Return to the workscreen and draw a few lines. Select another brush, go back to the Draw menu and try out some dofferent drawing tools - sch as Line, Airbrush, Stipple, etc. What happens when you use circle, Brush, or Polygon? Because these tools are creating Filled images, the Brush shape has no effect. Move on over to the Modes menu and turn off Filled. Now, try your brushes again with Circle, Box, and Polygon. Experiment with Connected and Concentric. Set Airbrsh to maximum Spread and Speed, and try a large brush. Before we go on, return to Distinct, and activate Filled within the Modes menu. Let's see how to define our own brushes. The Get Brush in the Brush menu lets you 'grab' a small portion of your screen (16x16 pixels) as a brush. To work, some part of the grabbed portion must have a little of the background color in it. (At default, the background color is black). Clear your workscreen, then use any of the drawing tools to scribble a few different colors on the screen. In the Brush menu, select a brush shape that you want to change. (Yo may use any of the shapes except for brush #1, which is the default cross shae in the upper-left corner. Also, don't use the fat, round brush; we'll want that for later. Now, select Get Brush. Your workscreen will appear, along with a small, highlighted box. Move this box over the area of your drawing you want to grab as a brush, then click the left mouse button. The area you enclosed with the brush box is now your brush, and you can draw with it to your heart's content. Take another look at the Brush menu, and you will see that your new shapes isnow included among the others. Hint: Zoom mode is particularly handy for creating detailed brushes. We'll skip Use Clip for now, but we'll discuss it when we describe the Clip menu. page 29--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING THE COLOR MENU We've already shown how to select any of the 32 colors from the Color menu. Let's take a look at the first two options at the bottom: Palette and Cycle. Using several brushes and colors, create a big, scribbled, multi-colored screen. Now, what if you want a different color palette? What if you want all shades of blue, or red, or you simply want to tone down or enhance certain colors? That's easy enough to do with the Palette option. Select Palette from the Color menu. The Palette submenu will apear at the bottom of your screen. At the top of the menu is the same Playback Bar that appears at the bottom of your screen when the main menu is displayed. We'll ignore this sfor now. For the moment, let's concentrate on changing colors. The second row of the Palette menu is the Color Selection Bar, containing the same 32 colors available from the Color menu, only arranged in a straight line. Look closely, and you will see a single pixel in one of the 32 boxes in the Color Bar to indicate the currently selected drawing color. Point at another color in the bar and left-click. page 30--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING The pixel moves to this color, and it becomes the current drawing color. You may also select colors directly from the ortion of the screen dislayed above the Palette menu. (And, while the full screen is displayed, press [C], and whatever color the cursor is on will become the current drawing color.) Select a color from the Color Bar that you wish to change. In the left portioin of the Color Palette menu are two boxes labeled: RGB and HLS, and to the right of them are three numbered slider bars. The RGB box is highlighted (as a default), which means that the slider bars will affect (from top to bottom) the Red, Green,and Blue intensities of the chosen color. When the slider bar is to the full right position, its color (Red, Green, or Blue) is at full intensity - or 15. The extreme left osition is zero intensity. By mixing the intensity of the three RGB color values, you may create any of 4,096 colors, of which 32 may appear on screen at any one time. Try selecting different colors and adjusting the slider bars to diffferent values. Notice the effect of the colors not only in the Color Bar, but in your workscreen. (For a full exlanation of the theory of RGB color mixing, see the Reference Section.) You've probably made quite a mess of your original pallette by now. Click on the Restore box over in the right of the Palette menu. All the colors are returned to their original values. Now, try this: Select the black background color on the far left (color register#0, and alter its color with the slider bars. Right-click to exit the Palette menu, then return to the Palette menu (select Palette from the Color menu). Click on Restore and nothing hapens. Use the slider bars to change the color some more, then click on Restore again - the color returns to its last value. This illustrates that Restore will only restore the colors which have been changed since the Palette menu was last called. There is another form of Restore in ZOETROPE, in the Frame menu. Exit the Palette menu and click on Restore in the Frame menu. Return to the palette menu and notice that the original black background color page 31------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING has return. (You may also have lost your entire picture. The Frame Restore deletes all changes that have taken lace since entering - and before leaving - a frame. It's related to the use of multile frames, which we'll cover in more detail later.) Whereas RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue, HLS stands for Hue, Luminance, and Saturation, and is another way to adjust your colors. Select a color from the Color Bar, and click on HLS so that it is highlighted. The number boxes in the slider bars change to vertical lines, and will now affect (from top to bottom) the Hue, Luminance, and Saturation of the selected color. Slide the Hue bar (the top one) back and forth while observing its effect on the selected color. Hue is just another word for 'color'. When yo adjust the Hue, the selected color changes, but maintains the luminance (intensity) and saturation (purity; or amount of gray) of the original color. Try the Luminance slider. The color remains the same hue, but changes in brightness. Now, adjust the third bar. This affects the purity of the color, or the amount of gray. (For a full explanation of HLS mixing, see the Reference Section.) Return to RGB mode by clicking in its box, and click on Restore to restore some of the original palette values. Now, look at the row immediately below the Color Selection Bar. A diamond and an 'x' connected by a line. This is the Color Range Bar, which indicates the range of colors you wish to manipulate. The Color Range Bar works with Cut, Paste, and Range in the Palette menu. It also efects the Cycle option in the Color menu (which we'll look at in a moment), as well as the effects in the Color f/x menu. You can adjust the Color Range by dragging the dots on either end of the line so that they 'bracket' the colors in the Color bar above. The range of colors affected will run from the color above on end dot, to the color above the other end dot. Yo may afect only a single color by dragging both dots to the same color. The direction of the bar is indicated by the diamond, which may be thought of as its 'arrow head'. Cut and Paste both use the color indicated by the Color Range Bar. Drag the Range Bar to cover the four colors: green, yellow, orange, and red (color registers #10 - #13). The arrow should be point to the right. Now, click once on Cut - which highlights briefly. You have just place those four colors in a special color buffer in memory. page 32--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Adjust the Range Bar to cover the four grey colors on the far right of the Color Selection Bar. Click on aste, and your four cut colors are pasted to their new position. Reverse the direction of the Color Range Bar by dragging its two ends across each other. Place the reversed Range Bar under the same four colors on the right end of the Selction Bar. Click on paste, and the same four colors are pasted in reverse order. Click on Restore to return ot the original palette. Now, reverse the Range Bar once more so it points from left to right, then stretch it to cover seven colors on the far right. Click on Paste. Notice that, since we have only cut four colors, only four colors can be pasted. Play around with Cut and Paste until you're comfortable wit it. Try adjusting the Range Bar so that it covers less than the number of colors that have been cut. When you're ready to go on, Restore the palette to its original colors. Copy presents a simle way to copy one color in the Color Bar to another. Click to select any color in the Color Bar as the source color. Now, click on Copy, then click on a second color in the Color Bar as your destination color. The destination color will become the same as the currently selected color. To the right of copy is Range, which could also be thought of as 'blend'. It works differently depending on whether RGB or HLS is highlighted. If RGB is active, Range averages the colors between the two end colors in the Range Bar. For example, if the color at the beginning of your range strip was pure white (15-15-15) and the color at the end of your range strip was ure black (0-0-0), clicking on Range would give you a blend of intermediate greys between those two extremes. Range will also work on odd color combinations, such as urple and green, and will try to find the best palette of intermediate colors between them. If HLS is active, Range will create Rainbow colors. It works best with identical, bright colors on both ends of a wide range. The best way to learn about Range is to experiment. So go ahead and try some different colors. You can always Restore your palette. page 33--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING We'll look at Use Clip later, when we discuss multiple frames and palettes. The last item on the Palette menu is the [%] character, which is like a secret passage to the Color f/x menu - which we will also cover later. If you want to try, go ahead! You can get right back to the Palette menu from the Color f/x menu by clicking on the [@] character in the Color f/x menu. Remember the Cycle option in the Color menu? Let's take a look at it. Restore yor original palette, then set the Color Range Bar to encompass all the colors in the Color Bar. The Cycle option in the Color menu lets you cycle through a selected range of colors as you are drawing. Erase your workscreen and select Cycle from the Color menu. Now, select Draw from the Draw men, choose a nice thick brush, and begin drawing. Because the Cycle option is active (as indicated by the asterick), your drawn line cycles through all the colors in the Range Bar. The order of the colors cycled though depends on the direction of the Color Range Bar. Move back to the Color menu and notice the astericks indicating that Cycle is active. Select any color from the Color menu, and draw again. What hapened to the Cycle? Look at the Color menu again; Cycle is inactive. Cycle is automatically deactivated when you choose a color from the Color menu. lay with the Cycle effect. Try different brushes. Set the Range control to encomass a different number of colors - or changes its direction. You can create a particularly retty effect by using the default cursor with Stipple or Airbrush, giving you a kaleidoscopic storm of cosmic pixels. (Don't forget that you can alter your airbrush spread and speed, too, from the Air Speed command in the Menu drop-down.) Experiment with Lines, Polygon, Circles, Boxes, and Fill. They all react a little differently in Cycle mode. (For detailed explanation of their effects, see Cycle in the Reference Section.) We've looked at the Palette menu as it is applied to a single frame. ZOETROPE is, of course, an animation program which uses many frames, like movie film. And each ZOETROPE frame may have a different palette. We'll take a look at how this affects the Palete menu, page 34--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING later in the Tutorial section. (We'll also look at the fascinating Color f/x menu.) Before proceeding, turn Cycle off by clicking on it again, or by selecting another color from the Color menu. While you're at it, make sure that Distinct and Filled are active in the Modes menu. USING TEXT Now that we're finished with our drawing features, it's time to play with ZOETROE's text features. These enable you to label yor artwork or provide spinning titles for your animated spectaculars. Clear the screen, and select a color from the Color menu in which you want your text to appear, then select Text in the Draw menu. On the full screen, the cursor should become an 'L' shape. Move the cursor to a position on screen at which you want your text to start, then left-click to set the start oint. The cursor chnges to an outlined box indicating the size of your text. Okay, type in a word or two. You can use [Backspace] to erase errors, and the [Return] key will drop you to the beginning of the next line. Right-click to return to the workscreen and the 'L' cursor. Now, you may reposition the cursor, left-click and add more text, or right-click to return to the main menu. NOTE: While in Text mode, none of the ZOETROPE keyboard alternatives will be operative. You can easily select a different font. From the Menu drop-down, select Set Font. The Font submenu will appear featuring whichever fonts have been assigned to the Amiga system. Click on any of the fonts listed in the font window and its example will be displayed to the right. The slider bar to the left of the window will scoll through the list of fonts if there are more than the window can display. page 35--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Font sizes are indicated by the number to the right of their title. If you want a big font, slect one with a large number. You may further affect the font by clicking on Underline, Bold, and Italic, in any combination. NOTE: ZOETROPE can access any standard, properly installed, Amiga fonts. Usually the fonts will be found in a directory labeled "fonts" on your boot disk. Your ZOETROPE disk contains a few extra-large, public domain fonts for special titling effects. From the CLI, you can install fonts from another directoyr by placing the disk containing that directory in one of your drives, and typing: ASSIGN FONTS: df1:myfonts The above assumes that your fonts are in a directory labeled 'myfonts' within a disk which has been placed in drive df1. You may also change fonts by placing a disk containing fonts, which has also been labeled FONTS, in any drive, then clicking on Relist in the Set Font menu. Try some of the fonts with different colors and styles. If you want to return to the standard default font, select topaz 8 before exiting the Set Font menu. THE CLIP MENU The Clip menu contains some of ZOETROPE's most important features, letting you grab all or part of your workscreen and move it about, or distort it in various ways. ZOETROPE contains a special area of memory called the clip buffer. When a portion (or all) of the screen is cut or clipped into the clip page 36--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING buffer, it remains there for future use, until another image is cut or clipped into it. Only one image may be in the clip buffer at any time. ZOETROPE functions such as Clear Pic have no effect on the contents of clip buffer. The first item in the Clip menu is Cut. But, before we use it, we need something on our workscreen to cut out. If you still have your text on screen, you can use that. Otherwise, draw some more multi-colored scribbles. Decide upon a small area of the screen you want to Cut out, then select Cut from the Clip menu. Crosshairs will appear, along with X and Y coordinate readouts in the uper left of your screen. (The X coordinate represents the cursor position horizontaly, the Y represents the cursor position vertically, based on a coordinate system where 0,0 is the position of the cursor in the upper-left corner of the screen. You can see this byi moving the crosshairs to the upper-left of the screen. See the Reference Section for a detailed description of the ZOETROPE coordinate system.) To cut out your image, place the intersection of the crosshairs at any corner of an imaginary box around the screen area you wish to capture. Now, while holding down your left mouse buton, move the crosshairs diagonally over the image. A box will form, and the coordinate numbers will change. While still holding down the left mouse button, examine the coordinates. The first two numbers are the X and Y coordinates of the point set when you first clicked the mouse, the second two numbers are the size of the box (in pixels) along the X and Y axes, and the third pair of numbers show the current position of the mouse. Move the mouse until the box completely encloses the image you wish placed in the lcip buffer (for purposes of later demonstration, select a portion of the screen that also contains some background color), then release the mouse button. The box disappears nad the screen seems unchanged, but a copy of your clipped image has been stored in the clip buffer for later manipulation. To demonstrate that your clipped image does indeed exist, let's look at Move. Move allows you to move your clip buffer image and position it anywhere on your workscreen, without pasting it to the workscreen. Select Move from the Clip menu, and the clip box outline will reappear. (Actually, the clipped image has also reappeared, but you page 37--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING can't tell that because it's sitting directly over the original image.) Point the mouse anywhere in the vicinity of the clip box, hold down the left mouse button drag the image. You can drag the clip box, containing a duplicate of your cut image, anywhere on your screen. The numeric coordinates display the X and Y position coordinates of the upper-left corner of your clip box, followed by the X and Y delta coordinates (the amount of movement from the starting position). Release the mouse button to deposit your image in its new location. Once again, the box and the image will disappear, leaving you with your original, unchanged screen. Now that we've moved the clip buffer, we can really see the effect of the Move command. SelectMove again and, this time, the clip buffer image appears in its new place - and it's obvious that not only the box, but the image itself has appeared. Try dragging the box to a new location, but this time, click far outside the box before starting the drag operation. In ZOETROPE, you don't need to be inside the clip box to drag it. This makes it easiy to position a clipped image partway off the screen. Notice that, as you move your image about, the portions of the cliped image that contain black (or whatever the background color sis) remain transparant, and the colors on the main screen show through. This is because we are currently in X-Ray Copy mode. Release the mouse button, then go on over to the Modes Menu and turn off X-Ray Copy mode by clicking on it. Select Move again, and move your image about the screen. This time, the entire block is opaque. X-Ray Copy affects the transparancy of the background color (colorregister #0) in all clip buffer operations. Return ot X-Ray Copy and turn it back on again so that the asterisk is beside it. Move onliy repositions the clip buffer. It does not paste the box down permanently. For that, we need to go to Paste. Paste operates exactly the same as Move except that the image is pasted (or drawn) to the workscreen after you release it. Let's try it: Select Paste from the Clip menu. Our clip buffer box appears along with our image. Drag the image to some place on the screen, then release the mouse button - a copy of the image is pasted to the screen. Try it again, moving it and pasting it to another location. Now, press [Help]. The image disappears. Try this: Select Move and move the image to a precise location that you want it. (Don't worry page 38--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING about being too precise.) Now, select Paste, but, this time, without dragging the image, press the right mouse button- a copy of the image is pasted right where it was. Thus, we can use Paste to first drag, then stamp the image in a new location, or simply to bring the moved image into view before pasting to the existing location. You canprobabliy guess what Paste Below does. Go ahead and select it. The clip image appears, as before, on top of the others. However, when you drag it elsewhere and relase it, the image is pasted beneath those on screen. Now, let's take a look at a variation of Cut - the Clip option. Whereas Cut allowed you to cut out any portion of the workscreen at any location, Clip is a form of automatic Cut that encompasses and places in the clip buffer every part of your workscreen that is not part of the background color. Thus, if you have a tiny squiggle in the clip buffer, if you've painted a scene that covers your entire screen, Clip will cut out and store the whole screen. We'll demonstrate it in several steps. Clear your screen, select a nice, bright color, then select the fat, round brush from the Brush menu. Chose Draw from the Draw menu, return to the workscreen, then click once to place a single, brush-shaped dot toward the center-top of the screen. Now, we could select Clip from the Clip buffer, but the menu might obscure the effect, so let's use the keyboard alternative of Clip - the [Tab] key. While close watching the single dot, press [Tab]. For just an instant, a white clip box surrounds only the colored dot before disappearing. Theeasiest way to check if it's there is with Move. Select Move, and move the clipped dot around the screen. Yup, it's there. Okay, release the clipped dot, then draw another dot several inches below the first one. Press[Tab], and, this time the clip box outline is just large enough to take in both dots. Let's try a third dot - place this one to the left or right of the first two, as the third corner of a large triangle. Press [Tab] again. This time, the clip box is large neough for all three. page 39--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Erase the screen and try Clip with various combinations and sizes of images. You'll find it a very handy function. There are a few more things we can do with our clipped images, besides just moving and pasting them about the screen. Erase the screen, then using the same round brush and bright color, draw a number '4' - about 1-1/2 inches high - in the center of the screen. Now, press [Tab] to place the '4' in the clip buffer. We can rotate our clipped buffers any number of degrees about any of the ethree X, Y, and Z axes. The X axis runs horizontally through an image, the Y axis runs vertically, and the Z axis runs from front to back - it's the depth axis. To put it graphically, a pig rotating on a spit rotates about the X axis; a revolving gas-station sign rotates about the Y axis, and the hands rotating about a clock face rotate about the Z axis. So, let's put this to practice: Erase the screen (we've already captured our clip images). Select Rotate from the Clip menu nad our clipped '4' appears on the screen within its clip box. Place the mouse cursor just outside the lower-right corner of the box, hold down the left mouse button, and move the mouse around the box in either direction. Notice that our '4' rotates about the Z axis, and the degrees of rotation are displayed on our screen. Rotate clockwise, and the degrees run from 360 toward zero; counter-clockwise runs from zero to 360. Release the mouse button, and the rotated image stays where it is, with the clip box still around it. We have only rotated the image, we have not yet pasted it to the screen. Move the mouse to just outside the right side of the clip box, hold down the left mouse button,and move the mouse around the box. Notice two things: First, as soon as you pressed the left mouse button, the image returned to its original orientation. And, second, the rotation is now around the Y axis. Release the mouse button, and repeat the above procedure by clicking just outside the bottom side of the box - this time the rotation is about the X axis. Rotate the '4' to some positoin you like, release the button, then click the right mouse button to exit Rotate mode. The clip box vanishes, page 40--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING and the rotated '4' is pasted to the screen. You could press [Help] at this point to remove it, but don't.) An important concept to understand is that only the pasted image has been rotated, the clip-buffer remains in its original state. To prove this, select Rotate again from the Clip buffer and - there it is. Whenever the clip box appears on the screen, we can drag it elsewhere. Since it's now over our previous rotation, let's move it aside by placing the mouse inside the clip box, and dragging the '4' to one side. We're still in Rotate mode, so we can rotate our image as we did above. You may have noticed above that the rotational axes depend on where we set our cursor outside of the clip box - Z was at the corner, and X and Y were at the bottom and side. Actually, anywhere outside the corners will rotate about the Z axis; the sides will rotate about the Y axis; and the top and bottom will rotate about the X axis. Also, the positions we chose, above, perform rotations in 1-degree increments, whereas the other locations perform rotations in various increments such as 45 and 30 degrees. (For a detailed illustration of the various rotations, see Rotate in the Reference Section.) Move the clipped image to varirous parts of the screen, and experiment with various rotation. (You may also drag a partially rotated image elsewhere, then continue the rotation.) At any time, feel free to clear the screen so you can see your rotations better. When you're ready, we'll look at Stretch. Stretch works, generally, like Rotate, except that it performs a stretch (or shrink) operation on the contents of the clip buffer. Just like Rotate, the actual contents of the buffer are not altered, only the pasted image. Also like Rotate, when the clip box appears in Stretch mode, you may first drag the image anywhere by clicking and dragging inside the box; clicking and dragging outside the box performs the various Stretch operations. Unlike Rotate, the Stretch operations are performed along only the X and/or Y axes, and the Stretch operations are cumulative - as we shall see. Clear the screen, and we'll use the same '4' as we did with Rotate. (If you've lost it, just make another.) Select Stretch from the Clip menu and the '4' appears in the clip box. Place the sursor outside the bottom side of hte box, press the left mouse button, and drg the mouse either up or down - the '4' stretches and shrinks along the Y axis. The numbers in the upper-left portin of hte screen represent, from left to page 41--------------------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL II: DRAWING right: the size (in pixels) of the X and Y axes of the stretched image, followed by the percentage of the stretched axes (X then Y) compared to their original size. Thus, if the original Y axis is 120 pixels, and it has not yet been stretched, it will be 100 percent of its original size; it if has been shrunk to 60 pixels, it will be 50 percent of its original size. While still holding the left button, stretch the '4' until it's a little larger than the original image. Now, relese the mouse button, move the cursor to outside of the right side of the box and drag to the right. This is what we meant by 'cumulative'. Unlike Rotate, when we select a different part of the box to scale, Stretch maintains the shape as previously altered. Okay, click the right mouse button to paste the new image to the screen. Select Stretch again, and drag the clipped image to a clear spot on the screen. Now, place the mouse near the outside of the lower-left corner and drag that corner in, out, up and down - the image is stretched along both the X and Y axes in either direction. Try the lower-right corner - the image maintains its original aspect ratio while being stretched along both axes simultaneously. Stretching from different corners and sides affects not only the axes, but the increment of stretching. (For a detailed illustration of the various Stretch modes, see Stretch in the Reference Section.) Play around with Stretch for awhile. When you're ready, clear the screen, and we'll look at Invert. Invert is fairly simple - it 'flips' the image in your cut buffer about the X and/or Y axes. Like Rotate and Stretch, you may drag the clip box to any place on the screen before, or after an Invert operation. Unlike Rotate and Stretch, the flipped image in the clip buffer remains in its inverted position. Select Invert and your '4' will appear within the clip box. The Invert operation follows a simple rule: the side of the image away from the mouse cursor will be flipped toward the side closest to the mouse cursor. Thus, to flip the '4' upside down (around the X axis), place the cursor outside either the bottom or top of the clip box, and left-click. To flip it about the Y axis, place the cursor outside either the right or left side and left-click. You may flip the image about both axes simultaneously by simply clicking outside one of the corners. Thus, if you click outside the page 42----------------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL II: DRAWING lower-left corner, the upper-right corner will be flipped to the lower-left, and vice versa. Note that any click operation is essentially a toggle - a second click from the same position will undo the previous flip. Now that you have flipped '4', click the right mouse button to paste it to the screen. Now, select move, drag the image away, and examine it - it's still in its inverted state. Mask changes all colors in the clip buffer (except the background color) to the currently selected drawing color. This is useful for cast-shadow effects, and to create complex masking objects from existing shapes. It's easy to demonstrate. Clear the screen, keep the round brush and, using Draw, draw a diagonal line about 2-inches long in the center of the screen. Now, select a different color, and create an 'X' by drawing a diagonal line in the opposite direction across the first. We now have a two-color image. Press [Tab] to clip the image, then use Move to drag it over to the side of the original. Select a third, distinct color from the Color menu, then select Mask from the Clip menu. For an instant, the clip box appears, and you can see the image changing color. Select Move,and take a look at the image. The two-colored 'X' is now one single color - the current drawing color. For an interesting shadow effect, mask the clip image with a dark color and paste it to the screen. Then select Cut and cut out only the original two-color 'X'. Now, select Paste, drag the two-colored 'X' over, but slightly offset of the single-colored 'shadow', and relase the mouse to paste the new image. You can now Cut the combined images and paste them anywhere you wish. Oh yes! Almost forgot to show Use Clip from the Brush menu. Have you still got that two-color, shadowed 'X' in the clip buffer? If not, scribble some multicolored image, then Cut it into the clip buffer. Now, select Streak from the Draw menu, and activate Use Clip in the Brush menu. Return to the main screen, and draw some streaky lines - your brush is now the entire clip buffer. Use Clip will work with Streak, Stiple, and Airbrush. For a wild effect, try Airbrush at high Speed and Spread with a large clip buffer. page 43----------------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL II: DRAWING At any time, you may cut a new section of the screen into the clip buffer, and begin drawing again. You can deselect Use Clip by clicking on it again, or by selecting any of the other brush shapes in the Brush menu. THE FRAME MENU We will now examine some miscellaneous, but nonetheless important items in ZOETROPE that pertain to its painting capabilities. These will enable you to alter your artwork in various ways, although they are also closely tied in with ZOETROPE's animation features, which we'll be addressing in the next tutorial. Take a look at the Frame menu. Plenty of items there. We've already covered Undo, and we've described Restore as it's used in the Ppalette menu. There's another use for it which we'll discuss when we talk about ZOETROPE's animation capabilities. So let's move on the Separate. Separate is a global color change that replaces every occurance of a specific color on your screen with the currently selected drawing color. It's a fast way to knock out complicated images (by replacing parts of them with black) or to radically change the color of an image without having to alter your Palette. Let's test it. First, let's set up a colorful screen. Select the biggest brush shape, activate Cycle, turn on the Airbrush and spatter the screen with color. page 44----------------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Now, pick a color from the color menu that you want another color on screen changed to (say, red). Select Separate from the Frame menu, place the mouse cursor over the screen color you wish changed (say, puce). Left-click, and wherever that color exists on screen, it will be changed to the current color. Separate Many works a little differently. First, bring up the Palette menu, and adjust the Color Range Bar to cover some five or six colors you want to change. Now, select a drawing color you want them changed to. Exit the Palette menu, select Separate Many, and all the colors within the Color Range Bar will be changed to the drawing color. (Notice that the keyboard alternative for Separate is the dash, or hyphen, while the alternative for Separate Many is the underscore.) Now, don't erase your workscreen! We're going to save it to disk, because we'll need it lter when we talk about ZOETROPE's animation abilities. Yes, we're finally here - we're going to do our own computerized cartoons. NOTE: If you already erased your screen, don't fret. Just make up another abstract screen with a lot of colors. THE LOAD/SAVE MENU Okay, it's time to save your masterpiece on a disk. Don't worry if it's not an electronic recreation of the Mona Lisa; whatever you've drawn, even if it's a screen full of multicolored scribbles, will be fine for or purposes. Place a blank, formatted disk in whichever drive you wish to use as a data drive. If yo have a single-disk system, replace your ZEOTROPE disk with the blank disk. NOTE: Once ZOETROPE is booted, its disk no longer needs to remain in the drive. page 45----------------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL II: DRAWING Now, select Load/Save from the Menu drop-down. The Load/Save menu is filled with a variety of functions, only a few of which we're concerned with at the moment. For now, Load/Save allows you to load and/or save your work to disk in various file formats, indicated by their particular file extender names. We'll be saving a single, static (non-animated) picture, so the file format we're interested is .ic, a standard, low-resolution IFF file. Click in the .pic box to select that file format, then click on Save. A special ZOETROPE file selector appears. At its left are a list of files from the current disk (or drawer). If you have placed your blank disk in the same drive that contained the ZOETROPE disk, the file window will be empty. If you have placed your blank disk in an external drive, such as DF1, click on DF1: to switch the file path to that disk. (If you're using a hard disk, click on the proper partition.) We'll call our picture MONALISA. Click in the field to the right of File:. A square cursor will appear. Press [Esc] to erase any letters in the field, then type MONALISA, and either press [Return] or click on OK. You don't need to type in a file extender, because you already set that from the Load/Save menu. The disk drive runs, and your picture is saved to disk. Okay! You've completed the paint program portion of ZOETROPE. It's a good idea, at this point, to go back and play with all the various drawing options we've discussed until you're familiar with them. When you're ready, move on to the next tutorial. If you wish, you may exit ZOETROPE, and reboot at any time you wish to begin the next tutorial. page 46 IS BLANK page 47--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION ZOETROPE TUTORIAL III - CELL ANIMATION Okay, you've learned how to draw with ZOETROPE, it's time you learned how to move your drawings. We're going to do a simle, flat (cel) animation sequence. But first, let's talk again about the Playback Bar at the bottom of the main menu screen. (Yes, we covered this in the first tutorial, but it's an important part of the ZOETROPE system, so we thought we'd hit it one more time in greater detail. If you feel secure with the Playback Bar, jump ahead to 'A Simple Animation', following this.) From left to right, the icons in the Playback Bar are: First Frame Click on this to move immediately to the first frame of your animation. Fast Reverse This fast-plays your animation sequence backwards. Reverse Play This plays your animation sequence backwards, using the speed set in the Time menu. page 48--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION Create Frame/Previous This inserts a copy of the current workscreen in the current frame position, and pushes the remaining frames to the right. Thus, if you Create Frame/Previous while on frame #3, a copy of frame #3 is placed in position #3, and frame #3 (pls all subsequent frames) are shifted to the right. Move Frame Backward Each click on this moves you one frame backward in your animation sequence. You may hold down the mouse button to scroll backward. Frame Counter Bar The number in this box indicates which frame of your animation sequence you are currently working on. Clicking within the bar on either side of the number box will move you to a frame either before or after the one in the box. Left will move to a previous frame; right to a later frame. You can move thorugh your animation in real- time by dragging the Frame Counter Bar to the right or left. (There must be at least two frames for there to be a slider bar.) Move Frame Forward Each click on this moves you one frame forward in your animation sequence. You may hold down the mouse button to scroll forward. Create Frame/Next This inserts a copy of the current workscreen in the frame position after the current one and pushes the remaining frames to the right. Thus, if you Create Frame/Next while on frame #3, a copy of frame #3 is placed in position #4, and frame #4 (plus all subsequent frames) are shifted to the right. Forward Play This plays your animation sequence forward, at the speed set in the Time menu. Fast Forward This fast-plays your animation sequence forward. page 49--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION Last Frame Click on this to move immediately to the last frame in your animation sequence. Total Frames This displays the total number of frames in your animation sequence. NOTE: If you left-click on this number (or press [Return], 10 frames will be added to the end of your animation sequence, all identical to your last frame. Frame Mode This displays a single letter indicating the current frame mode: To Frame (f), To Segment (s), or To All (a). Which frames are affected by certain ZOETROPE operations will depend on the frame mode setting. A SIMPLE ANIMATION Now that we've reviewed the Playback Bar, let's try it out. Click on the Create Frame/Next icon four times. With each click, you'll notice that the Frame Counter Bar shrinks as you subdivide the Counter strip into equal portions. Also, the number within the bar reflects the number of the current frames. Over on the right, the Total Frames box displays the total number of frames. Since you've added four frames, there should be a total of five frames in the Total Frames box. Want to try it again? Simple - select Kill Seq from the Menu drop- down, and reply 'Yes' to the requester. You've just erased all your frames, and you're back to one frame. Okay, use the Create Frame/Next icon to create five empty frames again. Now that you have a real Frame Counter Bar, you can drag the numbered box right and left to place yourself at the different parts of your animation. But since we havn't created anything yet, there's no noticeable change. Drag the number bar back to frame #1, and let's create something. Select a nice, bright color from the Color menu, and choose default brush #1 (the cross) from the Brush menu, and select Draw from the page 50--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION Draw menu. Now, go to the center of your workscreen and draw the number 1, about an inch high or so. That's it - nothing fancy. Let's move on the the next frame. Click on the Move Frame Forward icon, just to the right of the Frame Slider Bar. This will bring you to frame #2. As yo click, you'll notice your screen going black. This isn't surprising, since you havn't drawn anything on this frame yet. Right-click to return to the workscreen, and draw a number 2. Let take a shortcut to frame #3. Instead of returning to the Playback Bar, clicking, then returning to the workscreen, simly press the right cursor arrow key. The screen will be black, and you'll be working on frame #3. Okay, draw a number 3. Use the same technique ot draw a number 4 on frame #4, and a number 5 on frame #5. Now we're ready to play our animation. Right-click to bring up the Playback Bar, then click on the Forward Play icon. You'llnotice that you're now moving at speed through this animated sequence, flipping very quickly from the first frame to the last, then starting again on frame one. From tiny acorns grow mightly oaks; what you've just done is the foundation upon which you can create truly impressive, animated Amiga graphics. Right-click to stop your animation at any point. Now, try dragging the Frame Counter Bar back and forth for real-time control of your animation. Next, select Ping Pong from the Modes menu, then click again on Forward Play. Your number animation will now move back and forth. Is your animation moving a little too fast? Select Time from the Menu. The slider bar in the second row from the top controls the playback speed. The higher the number, the slower the playback. Drag the number to a higher value and try your animation again (you can play it directly from the Time menu). Ping Pong is useful for certain rhythmic movements. For example, if you have a dozen frames of a bird's wings flapping, moving down, then back up, Ping Pong would enable you to create a realistic movement in half the normal number of frames.) Turn off Ping Pong before proceeding. page 51--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION Now, let's try a more advanced animation. But first, let's examine how we can delete our current animation sequence. We showed you Kill seq earlier, which deletes all frames from memory. But what if we want to delete a chosen few? Drag the Frame Counter so that frame #3 is displayed. Now, select Delete from the Frame menu. A requestor asks yo to confirm the deletion. Go ahead and answer 'Yes'. Frame #3 is deleted from the middle of the animation, and you now have a total of four frames containing the drawn numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We can also delete a segment, or range of frames. Select Time again from the Menu. From the Time menu, you may alter the overall playback speed of an animation sequence, and you may determine which portion of your animation is affected by various ZOETROPE functions - such as Delete. You'll notice the Playback bar duplicated on the top of the Time menu. Below it are boxes for More (which enables you to load in the remainder of an animation that, in its entirety, cannot fit into your Amiga's memory), the Animation Speed bar, Tween (which enables you to perform sequential movements on objects and paste them on some or all of your frames), and the To Frame, To Segment and To All boxes. On the bottom row is the Segment Range Bar, which allows yo to set the range of frames uon which ZOETROPE will perform certain functions. This bar is adjusted in exactly the same way as the Color Range Bar that we used reviously in the Palette menu. We only have four frames in our animation, but let's adjust the range to include only the middle frames #2, and # 3. Drag one range dot to the right until the number on the right of the bar reads [3], adjust the other end of the bar so the number to the left reads[2]. (You may also adjust these by clicking on the arrows to either side of the Range Bar). Notice, that if you reverse the direction of the bar, the numbers to the right and left will be reversed. page 52--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION Above the bar, To Frame is highlighted, indicating that our oerations are being performed only on the single frame currently displayed. We want to delete our segment of frame #2 through frame #3, so click on To Segment. Now, right-click to exit the Time menu, and select Delete again from the Frame menu. This time, the requester asks if you want to delete frames #2 through #3. Click on 'Yes', return to the Playback Bar, and look at your frames. You onliy have two frames remaining, containing the drawn numbers 1 and 5. Take a closer look at the Playback Bar. At the extreme right, in the Frame Mode box is the letter 's' against a red background. This indicates we're in To Segment frame mode. Click once on the 's', and it becomes an 'a', for To All. This is a shortcut to selecting frame modes from the Time menu. Click again, and it returns to the familiar 'f', for To Frame. The red in the 's' and 'a' boxes is simly to remind yo that you are in a frame mode that will affect several frames, and cannot be undone. Set the frame mode To All (a), then select Clear Pic from the Frame Menu. A requester appears asking if you want to 'do it (clear) over all frames?' Left-click on Yes. ZOETROPE will move through all the frames in your animation and clear them out. Note the difference between using Delete to a range of frames, and Clear Pic to a range of frames. This time, we did not delete the frames - we still have two frames left - we simply cleared the images within the existing frames. Play around with what we've just looked at. Create some frames; draw on them; animate them; delete them individually, or by ranges; experiment with the different frames modes. BLUEING AND CHANGES Let's do another short, simple animation sequence - a winking face. Kill the animation you have in memory, put ZOETROPE in To Frame mode, and create five blank frames. Select the small round brush, ick a bright color from the Color menu, then go to frame #1 of your page 53--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION animation. In the center of yor workscreen, draw a face, similiar to the one shown in the figure below. (drawing of smiling face with round open eyes) Now from the Frame menu, select Next Blue. A copy of your frame #1 is placed in frame #2, then 'blued'. Blueing is a term taken from 'non-repro blue' used in offset printing. In ZOETROPE, we use it to line up - or register- our pervious frame images so we can alter them slightly to create animations. NOTE: The blueing color will always be whatever color is in color register #1. At default, this is dark blue, but will change with different alettes. If you're using a palette in which the blueing color does not show well, simle adjust color register #1 from the Palette menu to a more contrasting color. The Next Blue command has conveniently left uus in frame #2 to contine our cel animation. Trace over the face, as nearly as you can, but this time, alter one of the eyes to an oval shape - as though it's beginning to wink. page 54--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION (picture of smiling face with beginning of wink) Now, let's do a Next Blue again, but this time, use the keyboard alternative, so you don't have to exit the menu screen each time - press [/]. (All the blueing keyboard alternatives are in the keypad area to the right of your keyboard.) Next Blue not only copies and blues the previous drawing, it also relaces the blueing color in the previous frame with whatever was there before, leaving our new details intact. We'll see this when we go back to relay our animation. Now, repeat the procedure described above the for next three frames. Trace another face with more of a wink, press [/] for Next Blue, and repeat until you've reached frame five. (3 picture of smiling face completing the wink) page 55--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION When you reach the last frame(the eye should be completely closed; a mere line), Next Blue will simly remove the blueing color. Now lay your animation from the Playback Bar. (You may want to speed up the playback rate from the Time menu.) Voila! You've just created an even more interesting animation. A bit simple, again, but you're well on your way to mastering ZOETROPE's animation functions. Well, this is fine, you say, but my face is jiggling all over the screen! Not only the eye is animated, but the entire head as well. So, how do we animate only a portion of our sequence? Easy, let's make the same animation, but only animate the winking eye. First delete the entire animation sequence by selecting Kill Seq from the Menu dro-down. When you have only one frame, draw your face again, but this time, leave out the winking eye. So, okay, now we have a one-eyed face. Now, create four more frames by clicking on the create Frame/Next icon in the Playback Bar four times. Drag the Frame Counter Bar back and forth, and you'll see that all five frames contain identical, one-eyed faces. Okay, move back to frame #1, draw the first version of the winking eye where it belongs, then press [/] to Next Blue it. Because Next Blue only blues the changes that occur from the previous frame, only the winking eye is blued to the next frame. The rest is easy. Trace over the blued eye in frame #2, press [/] to move to frame #3, and so on until you've comleted your animation. When you play it back this time, only the eye is animated, while the rest of the drawing remains rock-steady. When you selected Next Blue, it automatically went through the following steps: Go to the next frame, copy the image to the next frame, blue the image, unblue the image in the previous frame. We can do these steps manually using the Blue Pic and Unblue Pic functions. First Kill all frames, then draw an image in frame #1. Next, click on Create Frame/Next to copy the image to frame #2. From frame #2, select Blue pic - the entire picture is blued. Trace a new picture in page 56--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION frame #2, then click on Create Frame/Next to copy it to frame #3. Go back to frame #2, and select Unblue ic to erase the blueing. And, so on. Obviously, Next blue is a lot easier, but there are times when you need the flexibility of using just one of the blueing tools. And there are a few more options in the Frame menu that help in creating cel animations. A standard method of animation is to first 'rough in' the extreme positions, then return and add the 'betweens', and then, must later, the colors. The History and Unhistory functions are designed for this. Kill any animation,create five blank frames, make sure the Color Range Bar covers all colors in the Palette menu, and activate Cycle in The Color menu. Select a large brush and draw a large multi-color number in each frame, labeling them from one to five. Deactivate Cycle. Now, move to frame #3 and click on Create Frame/Next [F7]. You are now on frame #4 (which dislays a duplicate number 3), the original number 3 is in frame #3 to the left, and the drawn number 4 (which was in frame #4 is now frame #5 to the right. Confused? Don't worry about it. Select Clear Pic to erase the duplicate drawn 3, then select History. Your frame now contains a blue silhouette of the previous frame's image, and a red silhouette of the next frame's image. If this were an animation, you could use these as references to draw your 'between'. Go ahead and draw a squiggle. Notice that no matter what color you were using before, you are now drawing with a bright green. Select Unhistory and all colors except the bright green are removed. Look at your color palette. Whenever History is selected, color registers #1-#7 are altered to provide the proper overlap shading. History and Unhistory are only effective when used for monochrome work - such as that used in initial animation. Later, you can restore your palettes and begin full coloring. You cannot entirely undo a History by pressing [Help]. Go ahead and try it; your images are restored, but not the palette. To completely undo a History, use the Restore function in the Frame menu. page 57--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION Get Changes and Next Changes are similiar to Blue Pic and Next Blue - except that they deal with the changes drawn within the current frame, since arriving there. The concept of what is considered a change is important. As we said, changes are any drawing that is done to a frame since you arrived at that frame. Once you leave the frame, the changes are part of the permanent image. If, for example, you draw in frame #2 (using different drawing tools, brushes, colors - or clip buffer pastes), then you move to frame #3, and right back to frame #2. The very action of moving out and back into frame #2 makes the previous changes permanent. Only those changes made now that you're back in frame #2 will be considered 'changes'. To demonstrate the Get Changes and Next Changes fetures, first Kill all frames, then press create four empty frames. Return to frame #1 and, using the Box function in the Draw menu, draw a red box, about 2- inches square, in the center of the screen. We want this box to be permanent, and this is easily done: move over to frame #2, then back to frame #1. The box is now permanent. Now, we'll add some changes. Using the same color, select Circle from the Draw menu, place the cursor on one corner of the box (any corner) and create a circle that overlaps about halfway into the box. (Of course, yo can't see the part that's inside the box because it's the same color.) Next, select a different color (like yellow), a think brush, and Draw from the Draw menu. Draw a squiggly line across boh the box and the circle, and into the background. Okay, we're all set. We have a ermanent red box, plus two changes: the red circle and the yellow line. Now, select Get Changes. Nothing much seems to hapen, but what really occured was that all the changes were placed in the clip buffer. (Remember the clip buffer?) There are plenty of ways to view the cli buffer, but first, let's move to a blank screen so we can really see what's going on. Move to frame #2, select Paste from the Cli buffer, and paste it to frame #2 without moving it. Hmmm...the changes are there, but what's wrong with the red circle - there's a corner missing. The missing corner exactly matches the overlaping red box from frame #1. Flip back and forth between frames #1 and #2 to see the difference. The reason the corner is missing is because it is a part of the permanent image in frame #1, and, because the circle was the same color, there was no change of image in that area of the screen. The squiggle line was in a different color, so all of it was considered a change. page 58--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION Let's try Next Changes. As we said, it's a little like Next Blue. Move to frame #3, and draw another red box, just like the one in frame #1. Make the box ermanent by moving to frame #4, then back to frame #3. Now, create the same changes as we did before: the red, overlapping circle, and the yellow squiggly line. Now, select Next Changes. This time, ZOETROPE automatically moves to the next frame in the animation and pastes the changes to frame #4. (It does not, however, place the changes in the clip buffer. You can see this by selecting Move to see the resent contents of the clip buffer.) Now that you understand changes, we can demonstrate Restore. We've already demonstrated how it can be used in the Palette menu and with History. It can also be used as a more powerful version of Undo. If you'll remember, Undo only restores the last drawing function you did. Restore, on the other hand, restores all changes. (Actually, it erases all changes, restoring the original frame.) Try this: Yo've already got several frames with images on them. From any frame, select another color, then scribble something. Change colors, tools, and brushes, and draw all over the screen - bt don't leave the frame. Now, select Restore. Like magic, all yor changes are gone. It's imortant to note that Restore is not a toggle like [Help]. If yo select it a second time, you changes will not return. However, yo can press [Help] immediately after a Restore to get your changes back. If, however, you have already selected Restore a second time, [Help] will no longer restore your changes. There's only one more thing to cover in the Frame menu: Flip 5. This is a special playback mode designed specifically to assist cel animation design. Animators are constantlyi flipping through the pages of their flip books to get a feel of how the movement is progressing. When yo select Flip 5 (most easily done by pressing the [Enter] key on your keypad), ZOETROPE plays once through five frames - the two before, the current frame, and the two following - before returning to the current frame. You can easily see this by creating eight frames and numbering them. Now, move to frame #5 and press [Enter]. ZOETROPE plays frames #3 thorugh #7, then returns to frame #5. page 59--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION NOTE that Flip 5 affects none of the functions usually affected by leaving a frame, including Undo, Restore, and the various Blue nad Changes functions. COMPOSITING Let's take another look at the Load/Save menu. Kill the animation you now have in memory, then select Load/Save from the Menu drop-down to bring up the Load/Save menu. We saw how to save our MONALISA picture earlier, let's reload it. From the Load/Save menu, select .pic and click on Load. From the file selector, either double-click on the MONALISA file title in the file window, or click once on MONALISA, then click on OK. (Or, if you know the name of your file, you could enter it directly in the File: field.) Take a look at the picture on your screen. We're going to use it for further demonstration, but first, we need to make sure there are some areas in it that contain the background color (color #0; probably black). If there are, you can leave it the way it is. If not, select the largest brush you can find, and color #0 from the color menu (it's the one in the upper-left corner). Now, draw a couple of black smudges here and there on the screen. Got it? Okay, save MONALISA to disk again. MONALISA is a icture type of file. Let's take a look at an animation, or .rif, file. From the Load/Save menu click on .rif, then click on Load. Select the file called FISH.RIF. Just before the FISH.RIF file loads, the MONALISA picture is erased from memory. As FISH.RIF loads, each frame is displayed on the screen (FISH.RIF is a four-frame animation). Now that you have fish up there, animate it with the Playback Bar. Let's underlay our MONALISA icture to frame #3 of the FISH sequence. Move to frame #3. From the Load/Save menu, select .pic and Under, then click on Load. Select and load MONALISA.PIC from the file selector. Because you've chosen Under, the picture appears beneath the fish. Go back and take a look at the animation now. As you move through, you can see that your background only appears in frame #3, and it's behind the fish. You may notice that your background isn't exactly the same color as it was originally. That's because it was probably made page 60--------------------------Zeotrope TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION from a different color palette, and we're using the FISH.RIF color palette now. When using Normal to load a file, ZOETROPE changes to the color palette of the loaded file. When using Under or Over to load a file, ZOETROPE maintains the palette of the image(s) in memory, but automatically trys to match the palette of the loaded file - as best it can - to that in memory. This may or may not be very successful, depending on the differences between the two palettes. Let's try something else. Kill the animation, then load MONALISA again. (Remember to set the mode to Normal first.) Now, we want to load the fish as an overlya, using MONALISA as a background. But all we have is one frame. So, click onthe Total frames number to create ten duplicate Mona Lisa's. Okay, we have plenty of frames to fit our little, four-frame FISH. Where shall we overlay it? Adjust the Frame Counter to frame #4, click on .rif in the Load/Save menu, and select Over. Click on Load and select FISH.RIF. When the fish appears on your screen, it's surrounded by a box. ZOETROPE is waiting for you to position him on the screen. At this point, you may simply right-click to continue the load at the given position, or you may drag the box elsewhere, and relase the mouse button to continue the load. A requester asks if you want to merge the file starting at frame #4; go ahead, answer Yes. Once the load is comlete, look through the animation - the fish swims over the backgrounds in frames #4 - #7. We can also underlay the fish. Move to frame #8, click on Under, and load the fish back in. He still apears in his box on top of the background, but this is only for positioning. Drag the fish to where at least part of hiim is over a black (or background) color on the screen. This time, the fish animation will be pasted on each frame beneath the background. We have a few more tricks up our sleeves. Kill the animation, then press [Return] a couple of times to create 21 bklank frames. What we want to do is load three versions of the FISH sequence end to end. If we did a Normal load of FISH.RIF right now, it would erase our 21 blank frames. (Remember, a Normal load erases and replaces anything in memory, even blank frames.) So, all we need to do is load FISH.RIF as either an overlay or underlay. (It doesn't matter, since we're loading it to blank frames.) So, go ahead, load FISH.RIF, page 61--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION beginning at frame #1 as an overlay. Once it's in, move to frame #5, and load it again; then move to frame #9, and load it again. So, now we have an animation of 21 frames, but only the first 12 contain our fishies, so let's get rid of the rest. You already know how to do this: adjust the Segment Range Bar in the Time menu to cover frames #13 - #21, select To Segment as the frame mode, then press [Del]. Answer the requester with a 'Yes', and they're gone. Now that we've shown the concept of creating empty frames and merging animations with Under or Over, let's demonstrate the easy way to do it. Kill the entier animation, then reload FISH.RIF in Normal mode. Now, click on Splice and load it two more times. Now we're moving! Okay, back to the Time menu, adjust the Segment Range to cover frames #3 through #9, and leave the frame mode at To Segment. Return to the Load/Save menu, and load MONALISA as an underlay. You guessed it, ZOETROPE loads the background to frames #3 to #9. Before you go on, click the frame mode back to To Frame. It's always a good idea to keep the frame mode in To Frame to avoid accidentallyi changing a whole range of frames. Remember, there's no undo on a range change. It's also a good idea to place the Load option back to Normal after you're through with overlays or underlays. (By the way, overlay and underlay have no effect on Saves.) What else can we do in the Load/Save menu? Well, a couple of options we'll just mention. The .col file is nothing more than a color palette. If you have a particluar color palette you like, save it as a .col file. Load a .col file to change the palette in memory. The .win file is used to save or load clip buffers. It will also load Delux Paint Brush files. Let's try a clip file. Move to a frame that has both the fish and the background. Let's put a small portion of the screen in the clip buffer; press [~] (just above [Tab], same as selecting Cut), and clip out the fish's head, along with some of the background. Paste the clipped image elsewhere on the screen to confirm the contents o of the clip buffer. Now, return to the Load/Save menu, select .win, and Save. When the file selector comes up, enter the filename: FISHHEAD in the File field, and press [Return]. As with all ZOETROPE file save operations, the .win extender will automatically be added. page 62--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION What we've just done is save only the conents of the cli buffer to a disk file for later access. Before we load it back in, let's change the contents of the cli buffer so we can be sure of the effect. Simplyi clip out another portion of the screen, then Move the clip buffer to be sure that it's different than the segment we just saved. Now, select Load (Over and Under have no effect on .win or .col functions), and choose FISHHEAD.WIN from the file selector box. When the drive stops turning, go back to the workscreen, and select Move to view the cli buffer contents. There's our old fish head, and it's back in its original location. We'll talk about .APM in the APM f/x tutorial, following. How about Ppatch? atch is a sophisticated disk I/O function that lets you load, edit, then save - all to the same file - sub-segments of .rif files. You should never use it without first backing up the .rif file that you're editing. To be especially safe, place yor backed-up .rif file on a blank disk with plenty of room. There should be plenty of room on the data disk we've been working on. On your ZOETROPE data disk is a .rif file called MRBLOB.RIF, which was created by Steve Segal. Before using it, copy it to your own data disk. There are several ways you can do this. You could Quit ZOETROPE to the Workbench and use the CLI Copy function to transfer the file from one disk to another. Or, you could select Pause from the Menu, which will freeze ZOETROPE and place you in the Workbench were you could use CLI to copy the file. (To return to ZOETROPE from the Workbench, either click on the front-to-back icon in the upper-right of the screen, or drag the Workbench screen down, then select Yes to 'Restore Zoetrope'.) Or you could load the file into memory, switch disk paths (or disks), then save the animation to the new disk. We'll describe the third method in detail. Place your ZOETROPE data disk in whichever drive you've been using for it, and load MRBLOB.RIF. Once the entire animation is in memory, swap the ZOETROPE data disk with your working data disk, then save the file. Youu are now ready to proceed. Play the entire animation so you're familiar with it, and note the total number of frames. We'll be patching in frames #5 - #12, to begin with. All right, Kill the entire animation in memory, then click on Patch in the Load/Save menu - the Patch sub-menu appears. The top three page 63--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION All right, Kill the entire animation in memory, then click on Patch in the Load/Save menu - the Patch sub-menu appears. The top three slider bars let us determine which portion of the .rif file we want to load. Adjust the Start slider to 5 (frame #5 is where we want to begin); adjust the Frames slider to 7 (we're going to load 7 frames, starting at frame #5); adjust the KBytes slider to about 200 (more than enough). Click on Load Patch, select the MRBLOB.RIF file to load, and ZOETROPE will lace only frames #5 - #12 in memory. The frame counter, however, will reflect the actual number of frames (#1 - #7). Once it's loaded, take a look at the animation. You can see that you're art way into the animation, and only a portion of the animation is in memory. Now, let's do some quick editing. Select Cut from the Clip menu and cut out some distinct portion of the picture. (It doesn't matter which frame, the cliped part should be about two inches square.) Select To All as the Frame Mode, Rotate from the Clip menu, place the mouse cursor jst outside the lower-right corner of the clip box, and drag/rotate the clip image to abot 350 degrees. Release the mouse btton and right click. A requester asks yo if yo know what you're doing. Sure, why not. Okay, play yor newly edited animation. Before continuing, don't forget to return to To Frame mode. Now, bring up the Patch menu, (click on Patch in the Load/Save menu) and click on Save. ZOETROPE will go through some disk I/O operations, and politely inform you of its progress. When finished, your edited segment will have been inserted into the old file. Right- click to return to the Load/Save menu, then Load MRBLOB.RIF again. Play the whole animation, and there's your new stuff smack in the middle of the animation. Let's go on aand examine that last visual effect - the Tween. page 64--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION TWEENING Tween got its name from the early days of animated cartoons. Typically, a master animator at one of the major motion picture studios - Walt Disney, MGM, or Warner Brothers - would draw only the primary positions of a figure. The expert artist would draw Mickey Mouse with his arm outstretched, then draw him with his arm bent up at the elbow, then draw him point at the ski. These three drawings represented the major movements of the figure. The artist would then let an apprentice animator take over to draw the 'tweens' - the frames in-between Mickey's arm movements. In ZOETROPE, Tween works much the same way. When active, Tween takes the beginning and end positions of your cut or clip buffer contents and copies th emovements sequentially across your frames - either your entire animation sequence (if you've select To All) or a specific ranges of frames (if you've selected To Segment). Tween works with the Paste, Rotate and Stretch functions from the Clip menu, and virtually all the image movement features in the APM f/x menu. It also affects various of the Pixel f/x, Color f/x, and Palette functions. (We'll be demonstrating these in a later tutorial.) Let's take another look at the special effect we did above. We'll test Tween with Rotate. Kill any animation that may be in memory, select a large brush, a bright color, and draw the first initial of your first name in the center of your screen, about two inches tall. Clip the initial (press [Tab]), Clear the workscreen, then press [Return] to create 11 empty frames. Finally, set the frames mode to To All (a). Now, go back to the Clip menu and select Rotate. As you do, you'll see your clip buffer appear, with your initial sitting inside. Place your cursor above the cli box, hold down the left mouse button, and drag the cursor around the cli box (it can be either clockwise or counter- clockwise). This will rotate the clip box about its X axis, in increments of 22.5 degrees. When you return ot spot you originally started from (the top), release the mouse btton, then right-click. A requester will appear, asking: 'Do it over all frames?' Select Yes. When yo select Yes, you'll see your initial being copied across all the frames of your animation sequence. Tween is taking the incremental movements from the Rotate command and spreading them across your entire animation sequence. (If you had selected a range of frames with page 65--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION the To Segment command, Tween wouldhave spread, sequentially, the movements across that range.) Now, play this forward. You'll see the letter rotating of its own accord. You can also experiment with Tween and Paste, allowing yo to quicklyi move an image across your screen. Select Paste from the Clip menu and drag the clip image to one corner of the screen. A requester will appear, saying: 'Do it over all frames?' Click on Yes. You'll see your clip box copied from its original position, moving from its starting position to its ending position across all the frames of your animation sequence. Click on the Forward Play button to see the results. You should be rewarded with your object moving across the screen. Note that the previous Rotation had no effect on the original clip image, and it didn't matter which frame we started the Paste-drag from because we were in To All frame mode. Agaoin, if you had selected a range of frames wiht the To Segment command, Tween would have spread, sequentially, the movements across that range. What happens if we turn Tween off? Simple: the only image pasted is the one at the end of themovement. Let's look. Select Move and reosition your image elsewhere on the screen. Now, turn Tween off (from the Time menu), select Rotate, and rotate the image to nay number of degrees. Release the image, answer Yes to the requester, and watch the results. The image is pasted to each frame, but only in its last rotated position. Turn tween back on, and take a look at the second row of the Time menu. To the right of the More box is the Animation Speed Control Bar, which allows you to increase or decrease the laying speed of your animations. The Reference Section offers comlete details of what the number in the slider bar stands for. For our puroses, all we need to know is the higher number, the slower the animation. Set the animation speed control at 2, its fastest speed, then return to the main menu and play your moving initial animation. Try some higher numbers (slower speeds). page 66--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL III: CELL ANIMATION Try this: Set the frame mode to To Segment, and the Segment Range Bar to, say, frames #4 through #7. Now play your animation. Because only the frames within the Segment Range Bar are played, this can be very handy for creating a worksace while editing an animation. You can create any number of 'junk' work frames before or after your animation segment in whcih to create cli images, then only play back the segment containing your animation. Yet one more trick. Reverse the direction of the Segment Range Bar so that the diamond is point to the left, and the bar covers all frames of the animation. Now, enter the Load/Save menu, make sure you're in To Segment mode, and save the file (call it RETRO.RIF, or something). Next, change the frame mode to To Frame, and load RETRO.RIF. lay it back and you'llnotce it plays backward! (Actually, it's playing forward. It was saved backward.) Before you continue with the next tutorial, Kill the current animation, reset the seed to 4, and make sure the frame mode is at To Frame. page 67--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X ZOETROPE's most powerful feature is the APM f/x (effects) menu. With it, you can easily animate cliped images, or entire animation sequences, creating complex, layered animations in minutes. The APM (Antic Pixel Mover) contains tools very similar to those found in sophisticated, $100,000 workstations - such as the Mirage, the Quantel Paintbox, the the Abakus DDR. You can enlarge images, shrink them, rotate them about multiple axes, and make them follow elaborate, twisting paths. Select APM f/x from the Menu drop-down and examine the menu that appears. It might look a little daunting, at first, but it's really very easy to use. The APM f/x menu has many features and otions for you to choose from, some of which we've already covered in detail, such as the Playback Bar in the top row, and the Segment Range Bar on the second row. Before we can use the APM menu, we need an image. Either a static image from the clip buffer, or an animation sequence. If you haven't already, Kill any animation in memory and make sure that you're in To Frame mode. Select a bright color (like red) and select the large square page 68--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X brush from the brush menu. Now, turn off Filled from the Modes men, and select Box from the Draw menu. Place the square cursor toward the upper-left ortion of the workscreen, and drag it to the lower- right to create an index-card-size frame (about 3"x5"). Now, go to Menu, click on Set Font, and select a big font. Return to the main menu screen and select Text from the Draw menu, then go to your workscreen. Choose a different bright color if you wish, then place your cursor where yo want your text to start (say, in the center, a little to the left) and left-click. Type in your initials in the center of the screen. When you're finished, go up to the Clip menu, and clip your entire workscreen, saving it in your clip buffer. This will be our examle APM screen. We don't plan on erasing our creation, but why not save the cli buffer to disk. Remember how? Click on .win in the Load/Save menu, then click on Save, and give it any filename you like. Okay, select Clear Pic, and we're ready to go to town. TURNS Select APM f/x (or press [A]) to bring up the APM f/x menu. The first thing we're going to do in the APM is a simple turn. You can accomplish a similar effect with the Rotate function, but the APM menu allows you finer control over your images. Once the APM f/x menuu appears, press [Return] on your keyboard, which will add 10 blank frames to your work area. If they aren't already active, select All and Tween (at the far right of the APM menu, in the upper-right corner). When the APM f/x menu first apears, the word Turn is highlighted (if not, click on it). To the right, and below it is the word Turns. As we'll see, selecting different words in the Turn, Size, Move, Path column affects what is displayed to the right. Don't confuse the singular word Turn with the plural Turns. When Turn is selected, you are in a 'Turn mode', and may adjust the Center, Axiss, and Turns. The plural Turns is the number of Turns. Move your cursor to the slider bar below the words 'Full Turns' and click once on the arrow point left. The number in the slider bar should read -1, which means one turn in a clockwise direction. page 69--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X Turn (singular) allows you to control exactlyi how you want the contents of your cut buffer or your entire animation sequence to rotate. With Turn, you can set arbitrary rotation axes by using the slider bars on the left half of the APM f/x menu. Turn lets you arbitrarily set the Center (of rotation) of your animation, the Axis (X-,Y- and Z-coordinates, or the three-dimensional positioning of your work on the ZOETROPE screen), and the number of Turns (gross rotational movement, either full or partial turns about the animation's center). After setting your Turns, click on Preview in the upper-left of the APM f/x menu. You'llnotice a full-screen wire-frame outline of your clip box rotating clockwise about the Z axis (the clip buffer's center) across your range of 11 frames. As you can see, when you select Preview (after setting the APM motion controls) it will activate a wire-frame rendition of how the AM will move your animation based on the current APM settings. If you have not set any of the motion controls, the Preview function will show a stationary box sitting on yor workscreen. Now, let's render our animation. Move your cursor over to Render and left-click. Answer Yes to the requester and you'll see your clip box appearing and disapearing as ZOETROPE renders it across the 11 frames you have allocated (your first frame, plus the 10 frames you appended). Render actually creates the final APM version of yor animation, drawing it on all frames indicated by the frame mode settings. (APM f/x are usually used over a range of frames for animation effects. However, they can also be effective in To Frame mode, when youu want to use the flexibility of the APM functions to manipulate a clipped imate - or screen - before pasting it to the single frame.) NOTE: You can Undo a Render To Frame, but you cannot Undo a Render To All or To Segment. You can, however, aboart a multiple- frame Render by pressing any key on your keyboard, or by holding down the right mouse button. A requester will appear, asking if you want to abort the Render. Left-click on Yes or No. Now, return to the main menu screen and play your animation. You'll see an 11-frame animation of your clip box rotation, full-screen. page 70--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X This rotation is an examle of the simplest, easiest way to manipulate an image in the APM f/x menu. AXIS OPERATIONS Before you return to the APM menu, clear all frames with the Clear ic command in the Frames menu. (Don't use the Delete Pic command, unless you want to create 10 more frames.) Since you are in To all mode, a requester will apear, asking if you want to do it (clear) to all frames. Select Yes, the contents of every frame will be erased, then when your workspace is clear, return to the APM menu. Now, we're going to do something similar to the last movement, but we're going to add a twist. Click on Axis in the APM f/x menu and you'll see three slider boxes appear on the right, with designator boxes beneath them. Axis lets you set which plane your clip box or screen will rotate about. The top slider bar sets the X or horizontal axis, the middle slider bar sets the Y or vertical axis, and the bottom slider sets the Z or depth axis. You can set the Axes with the three slider bars on the right of the AM f/x menu. The three Axis sliders together represent a vector, or 3-D location in space, about which yor artwork will be rotating. Altering a single axis value will not make a discernable change in rotation, but altering two or three axes will produce interesting multi-axis rotations. Experiment with the axis sliders individually. We've already seen the Z rotation. Select the X box at the bottom left, then select Preview. You'll see the wire-frame clip box rotating around the X axis. Now, select the Y box (bottom center) and then select Preview. You'll see the wire-frame clip box spinning about the Y axis. Now that you've previewed the three single-axis rotations, let's look at a double axis rotation. Click on the Y box (if you aren't set there already), then drag the X axis slider (the top one) to a setting of 100. Now, select Preview and take a look. As you can see, yor clip box is now spinning about two axes in a multi-axis rotation. Select Render and view the completed animation. The rotation now has a diagonal vector since you've added one axis to another. page 71--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X CENTER Now we're going to explore the Center option. First, clear out your animation with the Clear Pic option from the Frame menu, then go back to the APM and click on the Y axis (which zeros the other two axes). Select Center and three new slider bars will appear to the right. Again, from the top down, the three sliders represent the X, Y, and Z axes. This time, they represent the setting for the center of rotation. We're using the same coordinate system, where X and Y are at zero in the upper-left corner of the screen, and X increases with movement to the right, while Y increases with movement downward. The Z axis remains at zero at the center of the screen, increases on movement outward, and decreases on movement inward. For purposes of this tutorial, we won't go into details about the coordinates. The Reference Section has a comlete description of the slider coordinates. Besides, there's an easier way to set the center. Without touching any of the axis slider bar settings, click on the Mouse XY box below them. A set of crosshairs and centerpoint coordinates will apear on your workscreen, along with a second cross indicating the current center position. Move the centeroint to the upper-left quadrant of your screen (50, 50, or so you don't have to be exact) - approximately an inch away from the left edge of your screen, then left-click to set the new centerpoint position. As you do, you'll be dropped back to the APM menu, where you'll see the new coordinates appearing in the slider bar indicator boxes. Go up to Preview and select it. You'll see your clip box rotating about the new centeroint - the one you just set manually with Mouse XY. After you've reviewed the movement, go u and select Render, and play the animation. When you're finished, clear out all your frames and return to the APM menu. Note: Selecting Default will set your center of rotation to be the center of the cli box (if you are in Clip mode) or the center of your screen (if you are in Sequence mode). page 72--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X SIZE Now we're going to exeriment with Size. Size allows you to shrink or expand your artwork, any or all of your frames. You can also select a specific vanishing point (Center) where you want your art to shrink to or expand from, and the Scale (the amount your artwork will shrink or expand.) First, left-click on Clear (and Yes in the requester) to clear out all of your APM settings, then select Size. As you do, two indicator boxes and two slider bars appear on the right side of the APM menu. The Reduce and the Enlarge indicators work the the Size Ratio box (the box with the number, under Scale, when Size is activiated). When you set a scale, the new size of your artowkr is equal to the Reduce factor divided by the Enlarge factor. In mathmetical terms,s Reduce and Enlarge are the numbers that indicate multiply and divisor factors for an image size, sch as your clip box. Reduce starts out at 100. If you move it down without altering the Enlarge settings, it will reduce your artwork. Enlarge starts out at 100. If you move it down without altering the Reduce setting, it will enlarge your artwork. Now, drag the Reduce slider to 50. As you alter the setting, you'll notice the numbers changing in the box beneath the Scale indicator. At 50, your clip box is now at .50, or 50 percent. Select Preview. Yo'll see your clip box shrink down across 11 frames until it's half its original size. Now we're going to try something a little different. Move your cursor up to Tween and toggle it off. Then select Preview. You'll see a stationary box. Now, select Render. As you do, you'll see your shrunken clip box reproduced on every frame of your animation. By first setting the Clip/Seq box to Seq, this is how you can shrink down entire animation sequences (necessary, sometimes, to conserve memory). Okay, let's try something else. Clear out all your frames and return to the APM menu. Toggle Tween back on, select Center, then select page 73--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X Mouse XY. lace your cursor and click in the upper-left area of your screen, about one inch from the left edge. Select Scale and make sure Reduce is still set at 50. Select review and, after you've seen how the effect is going to look, select Render. This illustrates several of the functions we've just covered. Not only can you shrink or enlarge your image, you can make it shrink or expand to a secific center or vanishing point. MOVE Here's a way to do scrolling wipes or moving titles with ZOETROPE. Select Clear, then select Move from the APM menu. Move lalows you to move your artwork in a straight path, from one point on your screen to another. The three slider bars that appear on the right side of the APM f/x menu allow you to set the Move coordinate points. Again, the bars adjust, from top to bottom, the X, Y, and Z azes. After you've selected Move, move the top slider all the way to the right, then select Preview. You'll see your cli box move off to the right across your 11 frames. Okay, slide the middle bar all the way to the right, Preview it. Now you know a nifty way to do a diagonal wipe. Onward! Clear your frames, go back and set the Y axis (the moddle bar) back to 0 and slide the Z axis (bottom bar) all the way to the right. review, and Render it. You see your image flying off in the distance and to one side. When you're finished, clear out your frames and return to the APM, then click on Clear to erase your previous settings. page 74--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X THE PATH OPTIONS The path options in ZOETROE allow you to move an image on a predetermined corse, or path, about your screen. Select Path, and four option buttons will appear in a column on the right side of the APM f/x menu. The first one we'll play with is Path of Points. this allows you to set a specific pathway on which you want to move your animation. First, we're going to have to eliminate our venerable initials box. It's served us nobly but we won't be needing it again. Return to the main screen, select a medium-sized brush fromthe Brush menu and draw a hollow box about an inch-and-a-half square. When you've finished drawing it, Clip it [Tab], Kill all frames, then press [Return] twice to make 21 blank frames. Return to the APM and select Path of Points. The full screen will appear with the cursor and your clip box. To define a path, move your cursor around on the screen and click your left mouse button to set each path point, connected by line segments. For this example, make apath going from one art of your screen to another (make it zig-zag) or else make it in the center area of your screen, starting at the bottom and working your way around, a rough diamond shae, say. Whatever your ath shape, lay down about half-a-dozen points. When your'e finished defining your ath, right-click to return to the APM f/x menu and then select Preview. When you do, you'll see your clip box image moving along the path, starting from its original position. When you move your artwork along this tye of ath, it will take the same amount of time to travel between each oint. Therefore, it will apear to travel faster between points thatare far apart, and more slowly between points that are close together. Try another Path of Points. this time, cluster several oints close together, followed by several widely spaced. review, then Render the results. Now, clear your frames and return to the APM menu. Select Clocked Samled Path. When you left-click again, you will see a small representation of a spinning clock face. The clock acts as a timer for page 75--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X you to se while setting your path oints. It runs as long as your animation sequence will run. This is a 'real time' path mode which you may use to plot your ath and imart a sense of 'rhythm' to your artwork movement. Try this. Select Clocked Samled Path, left-click again and, quickly, move your mouse (you don't need to hold the button). Preview the move before proceeding. Render it if you wish. To trace a Samled Path, hold down your leftmouse button and trace out the path you want by moving your mouse cursor. Each pixel reresents an individual path point. Keep in mond that if yo lay down many more points than you have frames available, your animation might be both fast and 'jittery'. When you release the left mouse button you will return to the APM. FIRST AND MOTION You can set your APM controls to perform a variety of wild movements and bizarre image transformations, then save your favorite APM settings to disk. Thus, you can load them at any time and use them with whatever yo have in your clip buffer. Clear all your APM settings. Place the ZOETROPE data disk in your drive, and bring up the Load/Save menu. Click on .APM, and select Load. Look for the file called ONE.APM, and load it into memory. Return to the APM f/x menu, and select Turn (to get out of the path menu). Now select Preview, and witness the effect of ONE.APM. The wire-frame rendition of your clip box starts out on one side of the screen, thengoes flying off to the far right, and off into the distance. Let's examine the APM settings we just loaded in. On the left-hand side of the menu, is a box labeled Motion. This is a toggle, click on it and it changes to First. Motion is the default setting, and First is the optional setting. If you are in Motion (as we have been all along) all of the special movement settings on the right half of the APM f/x menu will be exected over the course of your entire animation or specified range of frames. However, if yo are in First, all of the special movement page 76--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X settings on the right half of the APM f/x menu will be used to position only the first frame - a very fancy, very recise way of placing your clip buffer at a particular location, then before moving it across your screen. The first frame of ONE.APM is almost off-screen. Click on Motion to toggle it to First, then select Turn. Notice that on the first frame of our APM animation, the clip box has been rotated -117 degrees about its Y axis. Now, select Size. You'll notice that the clip box starts out at 1.00 - 100%, or normal size. Now, select Move. The X axis is at -115, or the far-left of the screen. The Y axis is 0, or normal - the image doesn't move up or down. The Z- (depth) axis is at -115, or receding into the screen. Click on First again to toggle back to Motion. Now you'll see that the image is moving to the right (+241 on the X axis). Select Size, and you'll see tha the animation is being reduced down to 10% of its original size. Now that you've explored these settings, you can better understand how that first frame was positioned, and why the animation looks the way it does. Render it and play it a few times. Afterwards, clear your frames, return to the APM and alter your settings. Add partial turns to the clip buffer, alter the angle and axis, but be careful - it's quite easy to make your images fly off-screen. When you're finished, clear your frames and then go to the main screen. CLIP AND SEQUENCE From the Load/Save menu, load the FOREMAN.RIF animation from your ZOETROPE data disk. After it hasfinished loading, select .apm from the Load/Save menu and Load the APM file called TWO.APM. Play FOREMAN.RIF again to remember what it's like, then return to the APM f/x menu. In the lower-left corner is a box labeled Clip. This is another toggle, like Motion/First. Click on it, and it changes to Seq. If you are in Clip mode, the motion settings inthe slider boxes on the right half of the APM f/x menu will be applied to the contents of yor clip buffer only. If you are in Seq(uence) mode, the motion settings in the slider boxes on the right half of the APM f/x menu will be applied to your entire animation sequence (either All or a Segment) on a frame-by-frame basis. page 77--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL IV: APM F/X The primary difference between Clip and Seqence is that, when in Clip mode, the APM will perform specified animation movements, or transformations, on stationary mages (what is in your clip buffer) while Sequence performs transformatioons on an already-existing animation. In Seq mode, you are APMing each frame of your animation sequentially, whereas in Clip Mode, you are APMing only the contents of your clip buffer. Make sure Seq is selected, then select Preview to examine the TWO.APM effect. Now, select Render. The animation will be copied across the entire range of frames, using the APM settings and replacing the existing frames. This takes a bit more time than a clip APM. After rendering the animation, play through it to see the final effect. As the final version illustrates, you can use Sequence to produce an additional layer of movement on alread-moving images (the animation segment filling your entire screen), an effect equivalent to a movie screen with images being projected on it spinning through space. Return to the APM menu, we've got one last thing to do. Click on Seq to toggle it back to Clip, then go to the Load/Save menu and load THREE.APM from your ZOETROPE data disk. After the settings have loaded, return to the APM menu and select Render. Don't even bother selecting Preview. When the rendering is finished, go to your main menu screen and play it. Surprise! You'd probably forgotten about that box you had sitting in your clip buffer. But ZOETROPE didn't - it rendered it on top of your existing animation, imparting a wild, multiplanar effect to your work. Play through this animation, then return to the APM menu and examine the motion settings, as you did before. The value of this latter effect can't be understated. Save whole libraries of full-screen animations on disk, then reload them using different APM settings each time to eventually create a storm of zipping, scrolling, moving images. page 78--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X Now that we've covered frame modes and tweening, let's see how they afect the ZOETROPE color system. Before we continue, we should restore the default of ZOETROPE palette. And there's a fast wayto do that: Kill any animation in memory and set the frame mode To Frame. Select Color f/x from the Color menu, note that the Normal box is highlighted. Drag both ends of the Color Range Bar (fourth row) to cover all the palette colors, then click on Render. Press the right mouse button to exit the Color f/x menu. All done. MULTIPLE PALETTES We mentioned in passing that ZOETROPE can have a different color palette for every frame in memory. In its simplest form, this means you can move to any frame and change the colors in the Palette menu without altering the colors in the other frames. This also means that any palette - or portion of a palette may be applied to another frame - or range of frames. (If you're rusty on color theory, take a look at the opening paragraphs in the Color portion of the Reference section before proceeding). Let's create a colorful screen so we can see the efects of or palette changes. Select the large square brush, turn on Cycle in the Color menu, select Airbrush, and splatter the entire screen with colors (leave some background showing). Finally, press [Return] twice to create 21 frames of the idential picture, each with identical page 79--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X Now that we've covered frame modes and tweening, let's see how they afect the ZOETROPE color system. Before we continue, we should restore the default of ZOETROPE palette. And there's a fast wayto do that: Kill any animation in memory and set the frame mode To Frame. Select Color f/x from the Color menu, note that the Normal box is highlighted. Drag both ends of the Color Range Bar (fourth row) to cover all the palette colors, then click on Render. Press the right mouse button to exit the Color f/x menu. All done. MULTIPLE PALETTES We mentioned in passing that ZOETROPE can have a different color palette for every frame in memory. In its simplest form, this means you can move to any frame and change the colors in the Palette menu without altering the colors in the other frames. This also means that any palette - or portion of a palette may be applied to another frame - or range of frames. (If you're rusty on color theory, take a look at the opening paragraphs in the Color portion of the Reference section before proceeding). Let's create a colorful screen so we can see the efects of or palette changes. Select the large square brush, turn on Cycle in the Color menu, select Airbrush, and splatter the entire screen with colors (leave some background showing). Finally, press [Return] twice to create 21 frames of the idential picture, each with identical palettes. Go into the Time menu, set the Segment Range Bar to frames #5 through #10, and the frame mode To Segment. Move to Frame #5, enter the Palette menu, and alter several of the colors (using either the RGB or the HLS sliders). Exit the Palette menu and answer Yes to the requestor prompt. Reenter the Palette menu and move from frame to page 80--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X frame. Notice that the frames covered by the frame mode have been changed. If you wish to change a color for an entire animation, you would set your frame mode To All. (Don't do it now!) As with all multiple- frame changes, there is no undo. Speaking of undo, when we first covered the Palette menu, we showed the difference between Restore in the Palette menu, and Restore in the Frame menu. As you'll recall, Palette Restore onlyworked on the color changes made while still in the Palette menu. Frame Restore, restored the changes no matter how many times we entered and exited the Palette menu. The face is, Frame Restore will erase all changes made to that frame since entering it. Thus, while in To Frame mode, you can make as many color changes as you wish, and move in and out of the Palette menu as much as you like, as long as you don't leave the frame. Once you leave the frame, all changes - including color- are set. Reenter the Palette menu from frame #5, and change some more colors. Again, make sure frame mode is To Segment. Let's say you've been laboring over just the right color palette when you accidentially press the right mouse button, or the [Space] bar (go ahead). A requestor asks you if you want to proceed. You don't want to alter that range of frames, so you answer No (click on No). A second requester asks if you want to ignore changes to the palette. You've spent too much time on them (click on No). You're back where you started. If you didn't care about the changes and just wanted to get back to the main screen, you could have answered Yes to the second requester. Remember Cut and Paste? From the Palette menu, set frame mode To Frame and move to frame #1. Drag the Color Range Bar to cover several colors, and clik on Cut. Now, to move to frame #7, and click on Paste. This is how you can move colors from one frame palette to another. Set frame mode To Segment, exit the Palette menu, and page 81--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X answer Yes to the requester. You've just asted the colors to the range of frames. Notice that, when the frame mode is set to a multiple-frame range, the color changes do not take effect over the indicated ranges until you exit the Palette menu - although they do take effect immediately with the currently displayed frame. We have one more item to explore in the Palette menu: Use Clip. This replaces the colors in the currently displayed palette with those from the frame last accessed by the clip buffer. Move to frame #1, which contains the original palette without changes. Press [~}, and cut out any small portion of the screen. (It doesn't matter which colors are included in the cut). Now, move to one of the altered palettes (#5-#10). Enter the Palette menu and click on Use Clip. The palette is instantly changed to that of frame #1. COLOR F/X Select Color f/x from the Color menu, and examine the menu that appears. The Color f/x menu lets you manipulate your palette(s) to create special effects. Since it's closely related to the functions in the Palette menu, it's got the [@] symbol that you can click on to go directly to the Palette menu. The top four rows of the menu are the familiar Playback Bar, Segment Range Bar, Color Selection Bar, and Color Range Bar. The Color v/x menu is used in much the same way as the APM f/x menu. You choose your operationson the right section of the menu, then click on one of the three "action" items in the far left column. Preview lets you see the effect without permanently setting it; Render actually makes the changes; and Restore works the same as in the Palette menu - it's only good while in To Frame mode, before leaving the menu. Unlike the Palette menu, where multiple frame changes page 82--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X occured upon exiting the menu, in the Color f/x menu, multiple frame changes only occur after clicking on Render. When you first arrive at the Color f/x menu, f/x is highlighted along with Normal. You'll remember, we used this earlier to restore the original ZOETROPE palette. That's the function of Normal: replace the current palette with the palette first displayed when ZOETROPE is booted. When f/x is highlighted, there are nine special color effects available in the boxes to the right. Click on Shift, and these boxes change to two slider bars; click on Fade, and they change once more. Okay, click on f/x again, and let's look at the effects. Kill any animation you might have in memory, make sure the frame mode is set To Frame, Tween is on, and the Color Range Bar is adjusted to cover all colors. From the Load/Save menu, load .pic file called DIGI.pic. Now, press [Return] a couple of times to make some copies of the picture. Activate the Color f/x menu and move to frame #2. (We'll keep frame #1 as our original.) You can see by looking at the Color Selection Bar, this picture used a different palette from the ZOETROPE default palette. Click on Normal (if it isn't already highlighted), then point to Preview, hold down the left mouse button, and observe the effect. Release the button, adjust the color Range bar to cover only a few colors and, this time, click on Render. Remember: only those colors within the Color Range Bar will be affected by the changes. Before going further, adjust the bar to cover all colors again. Move forward one frame, click on Inverse, then click and hold the button on Preview - just like a color film negative. All the color effects may be examined from Preview. But there are plenty of frames, so go ahead, Render one frame each of each of the nine color effects, then move thorugh the frames to compare the effects. Experiment with setting the Color Range Bar to a limited number of colors. Any of the effects may be accomplished over multiple frames, depending on the frame mode setting. (Tween, however, has no effect on these f/x options.) If you begin running out of frames, press [Return] to append more, before you change the palette of the last frame. Now, let's take a look at the options available from Fade. But first, we'll clean things up. Set the frame mode To Segment, and the page 83--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X Segment Range Bar to cover all frames, except frame #1. Select delete from the Frame menu (or press [Del] and answer Yes ot the prompt. Press [Return] until you have some 20 copies of the frame #1 picture. Make sure Tween is on, and the frame mode is To Frame. Drag the Color Range Bar to cover all colors. Click on Fade. There are two options available from here - Tint and Blend. Tint will 'tint' all the colors in a selected range with the color you are using. This might be easier to se with the Normal palette, so move to frame #2, select f/x and Normal, Render it, then return to Fade. Adjust the Color Range Bar to cover the gree, yellow, orange, and red (color registers #10-#13). Select white as the drawing color. Adjust the Max Tinting slider bar to, say 60%, and click on Render. Examine the effect on the colors within the Color Range Bar. Try this. Click on Restore. Select the lightest color in the palette (white if it exists). Set Max Tinting to 100%, set the Color Range Bar to cover all colors, set the Segment Range Bar to cover frames #2-#10, set Frame Mode To Segment, make sure Tween is on, and click on Preview. Now, click on Render. While still in the Color f/x menu click on the play icon and watch the range of frames fade to white. You can use the same effect for fades to black - or to any other color. If Tween is off, all frames in the range will be tinted to the percent indicated by the Max Tinting slider bar. The Tint function is also handy when you need a palette for transparent shadowing. Play around with Tint over different frame segments. Try adjusting the Color Range Bar for different effects. Before going on to Blend, delete all frames except for frame #1, then clone it several times by pressing [Return]. Make sure the Color Range Bar is covering all colors. Tween has no effect on Blend, so its setting doesn't matter. Now, click on Blend. This funciton makes no use of the Max Tinting bar, so you can ignore its setting. Blend only works over a range of frames, so set the Segment Range Bar to cover frames #2-#15. Blend 'tweens' the colors, within the Color Range Bar, between those in the first frame palette, and those in the last frame palette - creating intermediate palettes in the frames in between. page 84--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X To work, the end palette must be different from the start palette (or there would be nothing to blend). So, move to frame #15, click on f/x, and select Red. We only want to effect this end frame, so make sure the frame mode is To Frame, then click on Render. Now, frame #2 (the starting frame of the segment) contains the correct palette, and the last frame contains an all-red palette. Set the frame mode To Segment, click on Blend, then click on Preview to check out the effect. Try changing the Color range Bar and Previewing it again. Try altering frame #15 in other ways, and trying more Blends. Again, feel free to experiment with the Blend function until you feel comfortable with it. Load one of the .rif animations from your ZOETROPE data disk, and try the various color effects with animations. Try different combinations of the Color Range, Segment Range, and Tween settings. Way back when we were discussing the Clip menu, we skipped over an item called Fit Colors. Let's look at it now. Remember, we described how ZOETROPE, during an overlay or underlay, automatically tries to match the loaded file's color palette to the one in memory? Actually, it attempts this with every frame palette - no matter how diverse. Unlike an underway or overlay load of an animation or picture file, when you load a .win file into the clip buffer, there is no attempt to match its colors with the current palette, so it can look pretty strnage if you paste a clip from a different palette. At any time, however, you can select Fit Colors, and ZOETROPE will attempt to match the colors of the clip image with those of the currently displayed palette. This this: Kill any animation in memory, set frame mode To frame, drag the Color Range Bar to cover all colors and use Normal to restore the ZOETROPE palette. Click on Cycle in the Color Menu. Select the Draw tool, and the largest square brush from the Brush menu, and Airbrush more multi-color squares on the screen. Press [Return] to create some extra copies of hte picture in frame #1, move to frame #2 and bring up the Color f/x menu. Click on Inverse, and Render. Okay, frame #1 has a normal palette, and frame #2 has an inversed palette. Go to the full screen, press [~], and clip a small portion of the picture into the clip buffer. Move the clip image elsewhere on the screen and Paste it (just to make sure you have it). Now, move to frame #1 and paste the clip image again. Notice that ithas taken on the page 85--------------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL V: COLOR F/X colors of the frame #1 palette. Select Fit colors from the Clip menu and paste it again. It now matches its original color scheme. Remember, ZOETROPE will try to fit the colors as best it can, based on the existing colors in the current palette. Some attempts will be better than others. Try altering some of the other frame palettes and comparing the results using the same clipped image. Let's take a look at Shift. Delete frames #1 and #2. We'll use the remaining multicolored frames for our example. Select Shift from the colro f/x menu. Make sure that FPSh is highlighted and its slider bar is set to 1. Set the frame mode To Segment, and the Segment Range Bar to cover frames #1-#9. Click on Render and play back the segment. Return to the Color f/x menu, click on ShOT and set its slider bar to 4. Set the Segment Range Bar to cover frames #10-#19, and the Color Range Bar to cover only a few colors. Click on Render then play the results. FPSh, which stands for Frames Per Shift, shifts the selected colors in the direction indicated by the Color Range Bar once very number of frames as indicated by its slider bar - when Tween is on. With Tween off, it shifts the colors a certain number of places (as indicated by its slider) only once, identically for each frame. ShOT stands for Shift Over Time. When Tween is on, this shifts the colors within the Color Range Bar (in its direction) a total of (slider-bar number) times over the given range of frames. Tween has no effect on ShOT. The best way to understand the color-shift functions is to experiment. Try varying the number of frames, and the numbers in the slider bars. Try the same things with Tween on and off. Shift colors on only one frame. Both Shift functions permit flexible and efficient 'color- cycling' animation, which uses no additional memory per frame. page 86--WAS MISSING----------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X MENU page 87-----------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X MENU ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X MENU Now we're going to take a look at some very special visual effects which can be used to add that spectacular, professional touch to your animations. Set frame mode To frame, and load FOREMAN.rif. PIXEL f/x Move to the last frame of FOREMAN.rif, and select Pixel f/x from the Menu drop-down. The first two rows of the menu contain the familiar Playback Bar, and Segment Range Bar. Beneath them are 12 ixel effects. Each are affected by the Segment Range Bar, and some are also affected by the Tween setting. For now, we'll look at each effect on a single frame, undo the effect, and go on to the next one. Click on Defocus, and watch the screen carefully. Defocus works slowly from the top down, blurring the entire image. When the blurring is completed, the menu reappears. Exit the ixel f/x menu, and Zoom in on some portion of the picture. Note the multi-colored pixels around the edges of solid colored areas. Leave Zoom on, ress [Help], and note the difference. Press [Help] again to see the blurred effect again. Before going on, press [Help] once more so the frame image is returned to its original state. page 88-----------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X MENU Defocus creates an overall blur effect, and can be used repeatedly (up to a oint) to create an effective illusion of depth, when applied over varying layers of images. Using the same procedure described above to examine the Antialias effect. Antialias is similiar to Defocus, except that it doesn't so much blur, as smooth the edges ina picture. It works primarily on diagonal lines, and leaves horizontal and vertical edges alone. It also requires a palette of related colors to work most effectively. Try Shatter. Each time you click on it. it shifts every other scan line one pixel in the oposite direction. As we'll soon see, this is very effective when tweened over a range of frames. (If you've Shattered the frame image more than once, you can use the Frame Restore to return to the original picture before proceeding.) Click on Wipe, then examine the whole screen. Hmmmm... We just erased the upper half of the screen. Wipe is really designed to be used over a range of frames. Press [Help], set the frame mode To All, and apply Wipe again. Now, play the animation. The animation sequence is smoothly erased from the top down. You could, at this point, underlay another anomation which would be revealed behind the wipe. Reset the frame mode To Frame, and reload FOREMAN.rif. Move to any frame, and click on Venetian. Now, we've knocked out every other ten scan lines. Again, this function is designed for use over a range of frames. Click on Undo, set the frame mode To All, and try it again. Venetian gives you (naturaly) a 'Venetian-blind' wipe. Reload FOREMAN.rif, set the frame mode To Frame, and return to the last frame in the animation. Click on Crystalize. What is that? Crystalize is a strange, but beautiful effect - deending on what you are crystalizing. We'll return to it later with a more interesting example. Click on Undo to restore the image before continuing. Click on Outline. This effect erases all pixels of any solid area, except those on the border. Used with an animation, you can accomplish some stunning effects with this. Restore the original image, then select some bright, constrasting color from the Color menu (like white). Return to the Pixel f/x menu, and select Edge In. The full screen apears, but nothing happens, because Edge In is waiting for you to select a color. Click in the black page 89-----------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X MENU background. Edge In outlines all areas of the selected area with the current drawing color. Click on Undo, select Edge In, once more, and click on one of the colors on the screen. Edge In can be used to create neon effects, among others. Click on Undo before proceeding. Click on Tile. The screen appears with the familiar crosshairs. Drag a box around the figure's head. When you release the button, the entire screen fills with duplicates. Click on Undo and try capturing different sized images to see how they're distributed. Among many other uses, you can use Tile to create grids. Try Unrez. This turns the screen into 2-pixel chunks. Ripple and Buzz are identical, except that Ripple applies a sine wave over the screen, while Buzz creates a sawtooth wave. Select Ripple and the crosshairs appear again. Create a box, anywhere on screen, approximately 30x50 (use the middle coordinates that apear in the upper left for box size). When you release the button, the entire screen is waved. Click on Undo, and try a box about 50 wide, and the entire screen in length. Click on Undo, and try the same effects with Buzz. Ripple and Buzz are only applied in one direction, but you can rotate the image 90 degrees before applying the effects, then rotate it back. (See the Reference section for details on the wave positions of these two functions.) Let's look at how the pixel effects operate over a range of frames. Defocus, Antialias, Outline, Edge In, and Unrez work the same way over a range of frames as on a single frame, and Tween has no effect on them. We've seen how Wipe and Venetian work on multiple frames; the Tween setting has no effect on them. Let's try Ripple. Set the frame mode To all, select Ripple, and drag a box approximately 40x40. Answer Yes to the prompt, and watch the fun! Play the animation, and you'll see that Riple (as well as Buzz) modulates one entire wave over the selected range of frames. Go back to the Pixel f/x menu and Shatter the current animation over all frames. When applied over a range, Shatter - like Wipe and Venetian - will average the number of frames in the range to split the image comletely off the screen. The final frame will always be blank. Load FISH.RIF. Set frame mode To all, select Tile, and clip just the fish. Play the animation - you now have a whole sea of fish! page 90-----------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X MENU NOTE: Tile used over a range of frames is extremely memory intensive, depending on the amount of animation within the tiled square. In most cases, you will be able to get at least 6 frames of Tile animation in a one-megabyte machine. Some things to try: Reverse the Segment Range Bar, and try Shatter over a range of frames To Segment: The two halves of the image will appear from the sides and merge in the center. Draw a large box on screen and create 20 identical frames. Set frame mode To All and Ripple the entire length of the screen 20 ixels wide. With the Segment Range Bar reversed over all frames, set frame mode To Segment, and ripple half the screen the same width (20x100). Observe the results. Now, rotate the entire animation sequence. (This is done from the APM f/x menu by setting the frame mode To All, turning Tween off, setting Clip/Seq to Seq, and turning the entire animation 90 degrees about the Z axis). Once you have it rotated, remember to turn Tween back on, and repeat the two riple steps above. Finally, turn Tween back off, set frame mode To All, return to the APM f/x menu, adjust the Part Turns bar to -90 degrees, and rotate the animation sequence back to its original position. And now, we'll look at Crystalize over multiple frames. Crystalize affects the ixels using a special alogrithm explained in the Reference section. Its efect deends on the color register used by the pixels, rather than the color itself. With Tween off, crystalize effects all frames identically. Bout with Tween on, the effect is cumulative based on the image in the first frame. Kill any animation sequence in memory, and restore the original ZOETROPE palette. Select the color in color register #16 and, using the Box tool, draw a small, solid box (about 1/2 inch wide by 1-inch long) to the left of the center of the screen. Select another color, and draw a circle - about nickle-size - to the right of center. Select white and draw a single, short line, somewhere below center. Leave two to three inches space between the three items; positoin isn't that important, as long as they have some 'elbow room'. Press [Return] three times, set frame mode To All, make sure Tween is on, and click on Crystalize. Answer Yes to the prompt and watch the magic. When the process is complete, select Ping Pong from the Mode menu, and play the animation. page 91-----------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X MENU NOTE: One-megabyte machines may run out of memory using the above procedure. Try reducing the number of frames, or making smaller images. Notice that the color from register #16 remains the same, whereas the others use various colors from the palette. Crystalize will always maintain the single color of color register #16, but will use multiple colors for the other registers. Two other color registers will multiply with only three colors. Can you find them? WARNING: Crystalize uses only the imagery in the starting frame as a 'seed'. All remaining frames will be erased, when used over multiple frames. Don't try using it on animations, because only the crystalized first frame will remain. MATTE The Matte menu is used to create traveling masks from animation files. It can be used for animated cast-shadows, and other advanced visual effects. Select Matte from the Menu drop-down, click on Load and load FOREMAN.rif. The Load and Save in the Matte menu will only load or save .rif files, and they will replace the animation in memory, regardless of the settings of the Load/Save menu (such as Overlay, or To Segment). Now that FOREMAN is in memory, click on Mask. Another file selector appears. Select the animation you created in Tutorial i - DINOALL.RIF - and observe the loading process. Play the resulting animation. Every instance of color in the FORMAN animation has become a transparent 'hole', through which peeps the DINOALL animation. The original background color becomes an opaque mask, hiding the DINOALL animation. Reload FORMAN.rif and, this time, select Imask (Inverse Mask) and load DINOALL.RIF. Predictably,this time the masking is reversed - DINOALL shows through the background, and every previous color has become a black mask. page 92-----------------------ZOETROPE TUTORIAL VI: PIXEL F/X MENU Note that, in both cases, the palette of the incoming animation replaces that of the previous animation. Notice also that, because the DINOALL animation has fewer frames than the FOREMAN animation, the last frame of DINOALL is used to fill the extra FOREMAN frames. (The same think happened in the MASK example, above, but the animation wasn't visible in the final frames.) Try the same procedure with Xor. In this instance, both animations are merged, and their colors 'Xor'd, creating, in some cases, a translucent effect. Some experimentation with color registers, and colors will be necessary to successfully use Xor as a transparency effect. (See the Reference section for details regarding the relationship of the various color registers.) The primary use of Xor is to combine two animation sequences, through the use of an intermediate, animated mask. A step- by-step explanation of this procedure is included in the Reference section. Here's a tip: Although Matte only works with .rif files, you can mask a picture by first saving it as a one-frame .rif file. Load your true animation first, then select the picture .rif file as the masked file. The masking procedure will always duplicate the last frame of incoming animations over the existing range of the original naimation. In this case, the last frame is the only frame - so the picture will be duplicated over the entire range. page 93----------------------------------ZOETROPE REFERENCE SECTION ZOETROPE REFERENCE SECTION All of ZOETROPE can be controlled by selecting either the function names inthe menus and submenus, or clicking on the icons in the Playback Bar. In addition, the function names in the menus are followed by letters or other keyboard symbols representing the keyboard equivalents for ZOETROPE functions. While you are working with ZOETROPE, pressing one of your Amiga's keys will automatically activate that function (except when you are in Text mode). NOTE: In ZOETROPE, whenever requesters appear offering 'Yes' or 'No' options, you may point and click on the word to select it, or you may press the corresponding keyboard key: [Y] or [N]. Alert boxes which offer only 'Continue' may be exited by clicking either mouse button, or by pressing any key. ZOETROPE begins with a blank screen and mouse pointer (or cursor. Clicking the right mouse button displays the Playback Bar at the bottom of the screen; clicking it once more removes the Playback Bar. Pressing and holding down the right mouse button displays the menu bar at the top of the screen, from which you may select the various ZOETROPE options. Clicking the right mouse button will, generally, remove you from any submenu into the main menu. From the main menu, clicking the right mouse button 'toggles' you between the blank screen (or picture), and the main menu. (Keyboard alternative: [Space Bar].) NOTE: For most of ZOETROPE drawing functions to operate, all menus must be removed, and you must be drawing on the full screen. If you find a particular function stubbornly refusing to work, look to see if a menu is present. If so, click the right mouse button until you have a full screen to work with. page 94----------------------------------ZOETROPE REFERENCE SECTION To select a ZOETROPE menu function, hold down the right mouse button and point to any of hte menu titles at the to pof the screen- Menu, Clip, Draw, etc. The menu list for that title will drop down. While still pressing the right mouse button, point to the desired function so that it is outlined, then release themouse button. The menu will disappear and you will be in whichever drawing or picture- manipulation mode you've chosen. (ZOETROPE's default color palette, will create a red outline box on selected functions. Certain palettes may render the outline box invisible, but you can still select any function releasing the right button while the mouse pointer is over the item name.) If you change your mind and decide you do not wish to select a function, move the mouse pointer outside of any menu and onto the main screen before releasing the button. No function will be selected. In certain menus (such as Draw or Mode), an asterisk displayed to the left of a function name indicates that the function is currently active. Some functions are 'toggles' and may be turned either on or off by clickong on the function name. Other functions (such as the three at the bottom of the Modes menu) are 'radio buttons', which means that only one - but at least one - must be selected. THE PLAYBACK BAR The Playback Bar is the icon-based strip which apears at the bottom of the ZOETROPE screen, and at the top of the Time, Load/Save, Pixel f/x, APM f/x, Color f/x, and Palette menus. The Playback Bar icons are similiar to those found on videotape recorders. By clicking on the icons,you may move through an animation sequence forward, backward, fast-forward, or fast-backward (rewind). You may also insert frames or easily view any frame within an animation. From left to right, the Playback Bar icons operate as follows: NOTE: The keyboard alternatives listed below operate whether or not the Playback Bar is displayed. page 95----------------------------------ZOETROPE REFERENCE SECTION - First Frame. Go to first frame of animation sequence. Left- click on this icon to move immediately to the first frame of the animation. Keyboard alternative: [F1]. - Fast Reverse. Left click on this icon to play your animation sequence in reverse (last frame to first frame) at high speed. Click the right mouse button halt the playback. If To Segment frame mode is active, only the selected range of frames will be played. If you wish to remove the Playback Bar during display, first click the right mouse button, then activate Fast Reverse using the keyboard alternative. Keyboard alternative: [F2]. - Reverse Play. Left-click on this icon to play your animation sequence in reverse (last frame to first) at Time speed (see Time). The Playback Bar will disappear before layback. If you hold down your left mouse button your animation will play up to twice the seed. Click the rightmouse button to halt the playback and redisplay the Playback Bar. If To Segment frame mode is active, only the selected range of frames will be played. Keyboard alternative: [F3], or up cursor arrow. - Create Frame/Previous. Left-click on this icon to copy the current frame appearing on your workscreen and add backwards to the animation, duplicating the frame before the current frame. For example, if you are on frame #5 of a ten-frame animation sequence, left- click three times on this icon to insert three identical images of frame # 5. The original frame #5 wil become frame #8, and three identical frames will be come frames #5, 6, and 7. In addition, your total animation sequence will have increased by three frames. Keyboard alternative: [F4]. - Move Frame Backward. Left-click on this icon to move backwards one frame at a time in your animation sequence. Keyboard alternative: [F5] or left cursor arrow. NOTE: In ZOETROPE, all direction arrows controlling slider-bar movement are auto-scroll. Left clicking on them will perform one page 96----------------------------------ZOETROPE REFERENCE SECTION increment of that arrow's function every time you click. For continuous movement, hold down the left mouse button. - Frame Counter Bar. The numbered box within this slider bar indicates which frame of your animation sequence is currently displayed. Its position within the bar corresponds to the curent frame position within the animation. Clicking within the bar on either side of the number box will jump to a frame position relative to the entire animation. (Click to the left to go backwards; right to go forwards.) You may also move through your animation manually by oint at the numbered box, holding down the left mouse button, and dragging the numbered box in either direction. - Move Frame Forward. Left-click on this icon to move forward one frame at a time in your animation sequence. Hold down the button to scroll forward. Keyboard alternative: [F6] or right cursor. - Create Frame/Next. Left-click on this icon to copy the current frame appearing on your workscreen and insert the copied frame after the current frame. For example, if you are on frame #2 of a six- frame animation sequence, left-click three times on this icon to insert three identical images of frame # 2. The original frame #2 will remain frame #2, and three identical frames will become frames #3, 4, and 5. In addition, your total animation sequence will have increased by three frames. Keyboard alternative: [F7]. - Forward Play. Left-click on this icon to play your animation sequence forward (first frame to last frame) at Time speed (see Time). The Playback Bar will disappear before playback. If you hold down the button during playback, your animation will play up to twice the speed. Click the right mouse button to halt the playback and redisplay the Playback Bar. If To Segment frame mode is active, only the selected range of frames will be played. Keyboard alternative: [F8] or down arrow cursor. - Fast Forward. Left-click on this icon to play your animation sequence forward (first frame to last) at high speed. Click the right