dELUXE pAINT v5.0 pART tWO HAM RAMPING When you paint in HAM, any colours that are not in your Palette (group "a" of the colours below the Toolbox; see Note above), are displayed on the screen by copying the colour in the pixel to the left and modifying one of the RGB components of the colour (You'll find a technical explanation of how this is accomplished in Appendix D). Because HAM mode can change only one of the colour components at a time, it can take up to three pixels to reach the colour you really want to paint with. This transition from one colour to the next is called a "ramp". Let's take a look at an example. Choose the largest square built in brush and the Freehand tool. Press P to display the Arrange Palette Colour Panel. In the Mixer, COPY colour 0 (black) to colour 15 (lavender). Now click SPREAD and spread between the two blacks. This will change all of your palette colours black. AGA users can copy colour 0 to colour 63 and do a spread between these two colours. Click on white in your colour set, paint a filled square on the screen, and press m to magnify it. You should see that your white square has a ramp on the left side. From black the colour changes to green, then to yellow and finally to white. The ramp required three pixels to reach white because the change from black to white requires a modification to each of the R, G, and B components of the colour, and there are no intermediate colours. If there were an intermediary colour in the palette, the ramp might be accomplished in more or less than three pixels and result in a smoother transition from black to white. Let's look at an example: Choose Palette>Default Palette from the Colour menu. Now you are back to the standard HAM palette. This palette contains some intermediate greys and an assortment of colours spaced throughout the colour cube. Click on color 16 or choose a white that is not in the palette. Paint another square on the magnified screen. (AGA users can choose a white in the colour set). Notice that this time the ramp is four pixels across, but the colours used in the ramp are much closer to the target colour of white, so the ramp is not as noticeable. Deluxe Paint chose a colour from the palette to start its ramp with. The colour it chose is colour 3, which has an RGB value of 13, 13, 13, very close to white. When Deluxe Paint chooses a colour from the palette to begin a ramp, it searches the palette from the left and chooses the first colour that is acceptable. And to determine which colour is closest, the program compares the colours in the palette with the colour you are painting with. So far we've been showing you what happens to the HAM colour that you are painting down and how Deluxe Paint ramps to create that colour. Keep in mind, however that if the colour you are painting ON is a HAM colour, the program will have to compute a ramp to create that colour also, so you will see a ramp on the right side of your brush. When Deluxe Paint creates this ramp, priority is given to the brush colour when selecting a colour from the palette to begin a ramp. When you paint with a HAM colour using the single pixel brush, you are actually painting with the closest colour that the program can ramp to in a single pixel. If you need to do detail work, you should put the colours for the fine details in the palette (the first 16 colours of the colour set, or 64 in AGA HAM8 mode). The construction of a useful palette is an important part of successful painting in HAM. With a little experience, you'll find the palette that works best for you. COMBINING IMAGES If you plan to combine images in HAM by loading in custom brushes, it is best to create all of the separate images using the same palette. This is especially true if you are using HAM animbrushes to be combined with a HAM background. We included a HAM background (Aquarium Background) and two HAM animbrushes (AngelFish and BettaFish) on the Examples disk for you to experiment with. These images all use the same palette, so they combine fairly well. Load the background image and create frames to use the anim- brushes against the background. The brushes look especially good when stamped with Translucency set to 30 percent. When you load a 32 colour or higher brush into a HAM picture, the brush is automatically remapped to use the current picture's palette so the brush will immediately look correct on the screen. The brush's palette is also loaded intact, so you can choose Palette>Use Brush Palette if you want to use the brush palette. Then load the brush again to remap to the brush palette. When you load a brush that is 16 colours or less into HAM, the brush is not remapped. You can choose to either use the brush palette or remap the brush. Remember that DeluxePaint V loads and saves palettes and colour sets. This should make it much easier and faster for you to combine palettes. HAM Fringing Fast Adjust Sometimes when you are moving a brush on the screen in HAM mode, you will see fringe on the right side of your brush. This happens when the colours in the picture are HAM colours, that is, not from the 16 colour palette. Deluxe Paint attempts to correct the fringing when you hold the brush still so that you can see how the image will actually look when you stamp down the brush. If you turn off the FastAdjust option in the Prefs menu (this option in ON by default), Deluxe Paint will attempt to correct the fringing effect even when you are moving the brush. The advantage is that your brush will always look its best, but the brush will also move more slowly when you move it around on the screen. Recompute HAM Fringing will be espccially noticeable when you load images from some other programs that support HAM. If you load an image from another program and find that the fringing effect along the right side of your brush is severe, choose the Recompute option in the Colour menu. This option remaps the picture to its own palette to eliminate the fringing. Changing a Pictures Colours in HAM Many artists are accustomed to adjusting the colours in their image by changing the RGB values of the colour in the palette and thus automatically changing all instances of the colour in the picture. Since HAM colours are not tied to the palette, you cannot directly change them by changing the RGB values. You can, however, change the colours globally with the BG>FG option in thc Colour menu. Here's an example of how to do it: Choose Palette>Default Palette from the Colour menu If it is not already displayed, press p to display the Colour Mixer Click on an empty colour slot in the Mixer If there are no empty slots, create some using the Delete button in the Mixer. Make sure the empty slots you create are not one of the first 16 colours Change the RGB slider settings to 12, 13, 0, (AGA users: 63, 53, 0) This should produce a bright yellow colour that is slightly different from the yellow in the palette. Because it is not one of the first 16 colours, it is a HAM colour. Paint on the screen with this new yellow. Click on another empty slot in the Mixer and change the RGB sliders to 15, 3, 4, (AGA users: 63, 6, 8,). This should produce a bright red colour. With the right mouse button, click on the yellow colour you created to make it your current background colour. At this point the Colour Indicator in the Colour Mixer should show that your foreground colour is bright red and your background colour is bright yellow. You should also have some of the bright yellow background colour painting in your picture. In the next step, we'll change the yellow colour in your picture to the red colour. Choose BG>FG from the Colour menu After a few moments, Deluxe Paint repaints your picture with all of the yellow turned to red. The BG>FG option changes every instance in the picture of your current background colour into the current foreground colour. In our particular case this meant that every pixel in the picture that had the RGB values 15 3, 4 (yellow) changed to the foreground colour (red). As you saw it takes a moment for Deluxe Paint to search through your image to change all of the pixel colours, but it performs this function much more rapidly than you ever could. Colour Processing Options To give you greater flexibility when working with HAM images in particular, Deluxe Paint V includes some effects for painting. The most notable of these are the Translucency and Process options in the Effect menu. We'd like to show you a couple of these very quickly just to give you an idea of why they are there and how to use them. Before you begin: Load the picture titled Retrospective from the Examples Disk. Translucency The translucency option lets you combine a specified percenrage of the colours in your brush with the colours in the image. This is especially useful for overlaying one image on another. Let's try a quick example. Select the Brush Selector tool and pick up the eye image in the upper right portion of the picture as a brush Press F10 to hide the Menu Bar and Toolbox. Choose Translucency>On/Off from the Effect menu (or press Alt-t) Press F9 to redisplay the Menu Bar Notice that a T appears in the Menu Bar to tell you that Translucency is on. Move the brush over the image of the earth viewed from space and stamp down the brush You'll see Deluxe Paint overlay 50% of the eye image over the earth image. You can also change the level of translucency by choosing Translucency>Settings from the Effect menu or press Ctrl-t. Since Translucency is an effect rather than a mode, it will also change the way shapes are painted on the screen. And, you can combine the Translucency effect with any of the Process effects to exercise greater control over the strength of the process effect. Choose Translucency>On/Off from the Effect menu to turn Translucency off The Proecss options in the Effect menu let you paint with different combinations of the HSV levels of your brush. Tint paints with a combination of Hue and Saturation. Hue paints with only the hue of the brush, if you're painting with a solid colour, this is a good way to convert a colour image to a monochromatic image as we'll see in a moment. Value paints with only the value of your foreground colour, and is a great way to add shadows or highlights to an image or even just to lighten the image overall. We'll take a quick look at the Hue option to give you an idea of how the Process options work. Choose Process>Hue from the Effect Menu to make it the current process option. Then Choose Process>On/Off to turn the Proeess option on. A P appears in the Menu Bar to tell you that one of the Process options is active. Press F10 to display the Toolbox. Choose the light pink as your current foreground colour. Select the Filled Rectangle tool. Press F10 again to hide the Tool box. Draw a filled rectangle over the eye image in the upper right corner of the picture. In a moment, the eye is painted over with pink and all of the colours in the image are shifted to pink. Using the Hue option does not affect the Saturation or Value, of the colours in the image, so the resulting image is a monochromatic version of the eye. If you want to see the effect against the original, repeatedly press u to undo and redo the change. As we mentioned above, the Translucency and Process options can be combined. Try some combinations of options on other areas of the picture. For example, try the Tint option with Translucency set to a high number to very lightly tint an area of the picture. Tutorial Four: Gradient Translucency A new feature of Deluxe Paint V allows you to create gradients with variable translucencies. This feature can be used in any mode, but the more colours available, the better the effect. This effect works best in HAM modes, 24 bit backing store mode, and if avilable, AGA modes. To get a good effect in lower colour modes, create good colour spreads and build contiguous colour ranges. In this tutorial you will learn how to create a gradient translucency in HAM and how to use some of the new features to Deluxe Paint's Range Colour Panel. To begin this tutorial, please reload the Retrospective ham image from the picture drawer of the Examples Disk. Select Yes if the program asks you to change modes. Hit F10 to turn off the menus and toolbox. Display the Range Colour Panel use the menu or press Ctrl-r to display it. If there is a range already defined for range 1, click CLEAR to delete it. Select the yellow colour in your palette and place it on the left-most bead of the range line. Now that the yellow colour is selected (white outline) you can give that colour a starting fade value/translucency. Click on the Fade slider and move it all the way to the right. As you do this you will notice that a small square bead appears below the yellow colour and changes from black to white as you increase the fade slider. Black is an indication of pure colour or opaqueness and white is an indication of no colour (100% translucency). The values range from 0 (fully opaque) to 255 (fully translucent). Deluxe Paint will allow you to place fade values on any individual colour bead in your range up to 256 colours. NOTE You can add fade values to bead positions even if there are no colours attached to that bead. This is useful for extra customising of your gradient translucency. Select a bead line (it will turn white) and give it a fade value You'll see that the square fade bead appears below the bead line even though there's no colour attached. Slide the slider under your colour bead all the way to the right. (The number at the right of the slider and under the pick icon should read 224; this indicates the bead number that is at the right edge of the bead line). Select the red colour in your palette and place it on the right most bead line. We don't need to adjust the fade value of the red colour for this tutorial, but if you wanted to you could. For this tutorial lets leave it at 0 fade. If you click on the fade slider, you will in fact see the black square bead appear. We've now created a HAM gradient that goes from a translucent yellow to an opaque red. Deluxe Paint automatically interpolates the in between fade values. Click and hold the SHOW button to see what the gradient looks like. You should be able to see through of the screen and see that it gradually gets opaque to the right. Let's do a gradient fill to see what it looks like combined over an image. Click OK to close the range requester, then press F10 to display the menu bar and Toolbox. Press F (Shift-f) or right click on the fill tool in the Toolbox The Fill requester should have range 1 as its current range. Choose the Hi button and Smooth Dither and click OK. Press C (Shift-c) or choose the Filled Circle tool from the Toolbox. Draw a circle over the little girls head in the Retrospective.ham image to give her a space helmet. Experiment with the gradient translucency effect. It's a very powerful feature and can be combined with lots of different features within Deluxe Paint V. This section covered only a small part of the world of HAM painting. We hope that the ideas we've presented here helped you better understand HAM mode and that you'll experiment freely with the new options designed for this mode. Tutorial Five: The World of Stencils In the following set of exercises you will learn how to create and use stencils within Deluxe Paint V. Although stencils are primarily used for producing quick, uniform lettering by amateur signwriters, they have uses that go far beyond that. Airbrush artists, for example, use stencils (which they call friskets) to cover certain areas of their work while they airbrush other areas. Deluxe Paint makes it easy to create a stencil for any part of an image, without the need to redraw the image. All you do is specify the colours that make up the stencil, and Deluxe Paint does the rest, no matter how intricate the image. Here's how it works: when you make a stencil for a particuiar set of colours, you lock (and thus protect) any parts of the picture that are made up of those colours. This means that when you have a stencil for a particular set of colours, you cannot paint over those colours until you turn the stencil off. It also means that you can essentially paint a picture backwards, from the foreground to the background, because you can use stencils to mask any foreground objects from the colours you are using for the background objects. Before You Begin Choose Load from the Picture menu and load the picture named StencilSet from the Picture drawer. Click "Yes" when Deluxe Paint asks if you want to change modes to 320x200 32 colours. Distant Snowcaps The left part of the StencilSet picture shows a distant mountain range behind a green field and under a colourful sky. (If you followed the preceding tutorial, you'll notice that both the sky and the field were created with a Gradient Fill, in a fraction of the time it would take using more traditional techniques). Note that the mountain range is actually made up of three ranges, with the more distant ones painted in lightest shades than the nearer ones. In this exercise, we will put a snowcap on the most distant range with out disturbing any other parts of the picture. This would be a tall order for any other graphic medium, but is surprisingly easy with Deluxe Paint. Lets see how Deluxe Paint does it: Choose Stencil>Make from the Effect menu to display the Make Stencil requester. Click Clear, click on Colour 8 (the one at the top of the second column), click Invert, and then click Make. With four simple clicks you have created a stencil that locks every colour in the picture except Colour 8, the colour of the most distant mountain range. The first click created the picture of any stencils, the second selected the stencil colour, the third click inverted the stencil configuration (making everything except Colour 8 a stencil), and the fourth made the stencil. To let you know that you have a stencil active, an "S" appears on the Title Bar. Note that clicking Invert simply inverts the current stencil configuration, saving you the trouble of clicking all the colours except the one you want to paint on. This is useful if you want to paint on one or two selected colours to the exclusion of the rest; if you want to create a stencil to lock only one or a few colours, you don't need to use invert. The next step is to paint the snow on the distant mountain range: Press p to display the Mixer. Change Colour 1 (the second colour in the palette) from grey to white by dragging the RGB sliders all the way to the right. Select white as the foreground colour and then select the one pixel brush and the Airbrush tool. Move the cursor over to the distant mountain range and spray a snowcap on it. Because every colour except that of the most distant mountain range has been locked, you can spray without fear of splattering any adjoining colours. Note that although the white you are spraying on the mountain range is onc of the locked colors, it is not itself locked while you are applying it. This means that you can paint over it with another colour (such as the final colour of the mountain, if you don't like the look of the snowcap) redo as though it were unlocked. To lock a recently applied colour, just select Stencil>Remake. You don't need to display the Stencil requester again, because the configuration is still as you want it. This also means that you can use the "Again" key (a) to update your stencil, if Remake was your last menu command Tip The Again rule is simple: press a whenever you want to repeat the immediately preceding menu command, to save you moving the mouse up to the Menu Bar and through menu and submenu options. If your last menu command produced a requester, then pressing a will produce that same requester, without the need for menu selections. Sunrise in the Rockies In this exercise, we make the sun rise behind the mountains, so we need to lock every colour except the sky. Here's how: Display the Make Stencil requester (Colour 8 should be the only unlocked colour in the requester). Now click Colour 8 to lock it, and then click. Colours 0 (black) and 12 through 16 (the sky colours) to unlock them. (Colour 12 is halfway down the second column, and Colour 16 is at the top of the third column). Click Make. You have now locked every colour in the landscape except the sky colours Now let's make the sun rise: Choose Stencil>On/Off from the Effect menu to turn the stencil off. In Deluxe Paint V your stencil affects picking up a brush - you can only pick up areas that are not in the stencil. Since the orange shades in the sun are part of the stencil, you turned off the stencil momentarily to pick up that area of the picture. Click the Brush Selector, move the large cross hair over to the sun image (on the far right of the screen) and pick it up with the left mouse button. Move the brush over to the mountain range. Choose Stencil>On/Off from the Effect menu to turn the stencil on. Did you see the sun move behind the mountains and then peek through? This is because every colour except the sky colours and the back ground is locked, and so will not accommodate the sun brush. When you are satisfied with the placement of the sun, click to stamp an image of it there. Cutting some Z's In this exercise we will explore further aspects of Deluxe Paint's powerful stencil editor. In particular, you'll see how to turn stencil colours on and off from any part of your picture, not just from the Make Stencil requester. (Display the Make Stencil requester and click Clear to clear the stencil. Now move the cursor outside the requester and click the large Z shape. Click Invert and then click Make to return to the painting screen. Did you notice that when you clicked the Z the Make Stencil requester responded by locking that colour? This means that you can lock and unlock colours directly from your image just by clicking them. Note that clicking with the left mouse button adds a colour to the stencil and clicking with the right mouse button deletes a colour from the stencil. And to make it easy to find the colours you want to lock or unlock, you can move the Make stencil requester to any part of the screen just by moving the cursor to the top of the requester, pressing the left mouse button, and dragging it to a new position. Now let's see what we can do with the stencil we just created: Press the ' (accent grave/tilde) key to turn off the stencil. Pressing ' is the same as choosing Stencil>On/Off from the Effect menu. This is a very important keyboard equivalent for working with stencils. Click the Brush Selector and pick up the textured area to the right of the Z. Press ' to turn on the stencil. Move the cursor over to the Z and watch what happens. Did you see the textured brush appear behind the Z? Because all the colours except the Z are locked, it looks like you're viewing the textured brush through a Z shaped window. Now when you place the textured brush behind the Z and click, you will fill the Z with the textured pattern. Fixing the Background By using a combination of stencils and fixing the background, you can define a stencil by area rather than colour. This lets you confine a stencil to a particular area of the page, without forcing you to lock every instance of a particular colour. Let's take a closer look: Make sure the stencil is off and then pick up the small clump of pine trees from the right hand side of the page. From the Effect menu, choose Background>Fix. You have just fixed the picture to the background (the "B" in the Title Bar tells you so), which means you can always return to that picture by clicking CLR. Thus, you can stamp pine trees all over the landscape and then return to the original picture at any time. You can also fix the background successively, updating the picture from the previous "fix". (As we saw earlier, you can use the "Again" key (a) to repeat the immediately preceding menu command). For the purpose of this exercise, go ahead and stamp at few clumps of pine trees in front of the closest mountain range. Now let's turn that collection of pine trees into a stencil: From the Effect menu, select Background>Lock FG. This last action turned the foreground (ie. everything you added to the picture since fixing the background) into a stencil but without affecting any other part of the picture that uses those same colours. Try it and see your pine tree bush over to the pine forest and you'll see that your stencil goes behind the forest but in front of everything else. You can remove the stencil either by turning the stencil off or making a stencil by locking colours. The colour and area methods are mutually exclusive, so using one method automatically negates the other. And as is the case with regular stencils, clicking CLR does not clear the stencilled area - it is protected until you turn it off just like the fixed background. Painting a Stencil A more powerful way to define a stencil by area is to "print" it. You can do this with Deluxe Paint V's Stencil>Paint option. Painting a stencil can be invaluable for protecting areas that are not easily defined by colour. In the next few steps we'll show you how to "cookie-cut" an area of your image to create the first of the two logos in the StencilSet image. At this point you should still be working with the StencilSet picture from the exercise above. If you still have Fixed Background active from the previous exercise, choose Background>Free from the Effect menu. Choose Stencil>Make from the Effect menu. Click Clear and Make in the requester to clear your stencil. When you use Stencil Paint, you can either add to an existing colour-based stencil or you can start from scratch. When you choose this option. Deluxe Paint calculates the stencil based on the colours that are selected in the Make Stencil requester and then presents you with a screen that you can use to add or subtract areas from. So, to start from scratch, you need to clear the Make Stencil requester as we did above. In the next few steps, you'll pick up a brush to print in the stencil with and turn on Stencil Paint to paint down your stencil. Then you'll reverse the stencil and pick up a new brush. Click the Brush Selector tool and pick up the red, yellow and green logo as a custom brush. Choose Stencil>Paint from the Effect menu. In a moment, your image is dimmed and a lower case "s" appears in the Menu Bat to show that you are in Stencil Paint mode. Move your brush over to the mountain range so that the sunrise is in the lower part of the circle and click with the left mouse button. Painting with the left mouse button adds to the stencil (which you see as lighter colours) and painting with the right mouse button subtracts from the stencil. By clicking down your brush, you created a stencilled area that is the shape of the brush. Now exit Stencil Paint and reverse the stencil. Choose Stencil>Paint to turn off the mode and create your stencil. It's important to correctly turn off the Stencil Paint mode the same way you entered it. If you try to use other options while in Stencil Paint, Deluxe Paint may turn off the mode for you, but there is no guarantee that in those instances it will save the changes to the stencil. If you think you'll be using this feature a lot, you should get used to the keyboard equivalent: Ctrl-s. Choose Stencil>Reverse to reverse your stencil so that all areas exept the logo shaped area of the mountain range is protected. Choose the Brush Selector tool. Pick up the mountain range as a brush. And press the ' (accent grave) key to turn off the stencil. Now you should be holding a brush like the first of the logos in the StencilSet. With a little creativity you can combine Stencil Paint and the new gradient fills we showed you earlier in the chapter to create some stunning effects. Stencils in HAM When you're working in HAM or 24 bit backing store mode, the Make Stencil requester is a bit different from the one you see in other modes. This requester doesn't attempt to show you which of the possible colours you have locked. Instead, it gives you powerful ways to lock colours individually or based on a tolerance level. It then lets you view the stencil as you would by choosing Stencil>Show. In the next pages we'll take a quick look at the features of the Make Stencil requester in HAM mode. Due to the heavy computational and memory requirements of the Make Stencil option in HAM, this feature will be somewhat slow on lower-end Amigas. If your Amiga has no more than 2MB of RAM or 512K of Chip RAM, we recommend that you use the Stencil>Paint feature to create stencils in HAM. However, if you are patient you might want to work through this section: it might be just the thing for you. Before we begin: Choose Screen format from the file menu and change your screen format to Lo-Res 320x200 HAM. If you don't already have the StencilSet picture loaded, load it now and choose NO to converting to the Screen format of the file. Choose Stencil>Make from the Effect menu. You'll see a Make Stencil requester like the one in Figure 4.18. The Clear, Invert, Make and Cancel buttons in this requester perform essentially the same function as they do in the Make Stencil requester in other modes. The important new concepts we want to show you are Show, Fine Tune, and Tolerance. Tolerance The tolerance setting lets you click on a single colour in your picture and simultaneously lock (or unlock) all "similar" colours in the image. The tolerance number determines how different a colour can be and still be considered "similar" to the one you clicked on. A low Tolerance number requires that the colours be very similar, while a high Tolerance number locks colours that may be very different from the colour you clicked. The range of Tolerance values runs from 0 to 48. At 0 tolerance, only colours rhat are identical to the colour you click on will be affected. At 48 tolerance, all colours will be affected. TECHNICAL NOTE Tolerance is calculated in the RGB cube colour space. Each increment of tolerance represents a change of 1 on any of the RGB values of the colour you clicked on. To see how tolerance works in a practical application, we'll use it to lock the green colours in the StencilSet image. When you first open the Make Stencil requester, Tolerance is set at 4. We'll leave it at four as we choose our first colour. Move the cursor down to the bottom of the green grass area of the sunset image and click once on the lightest green. Click on a colour with the left mouse button tells Deuxe Paint that you want to lock that colour. Notice that the colour appears in a box beside the Tolerance option and a black "lock" bracket appears beside the colour to show that you have locked it. You could click Make to exit the requester with your stencil, but instead, we'll use the Show button to confirm that we locked the colours we wanted. Click the Show check box to show your stencil. After a moment of calculations, Deluxe Paint will dim your image and show your stencil as lighter areas in the imagejust as if you had chosen Show from the Stencil sub-menu. You'll see that many more greens than the one you clicked on are stencilled. But not all greens are stencilled, because your tolerance was set to only 4. You'll also see that part of the green triangle from the Electronic Arts logo and the green of the trees is also stencilled. Now suppose that you actually wanted to select more greens than the ones that were stencilled in this first attempt. You can do this in two ways either click on another green that is not stencilled to lock it and all colours to it or increase the tolerance setting. Let's try the latter method now. Click in the tolerance edit field to the right of the number 4, back space to delete it, and change the number to 8. When you press Enter or click outside the requester, Deluxe Paint automatically recalculates your stencil, and after a moment it shows you your stencil with the new tolerance value. Now you'll see that two thirds of the greens are selected in your image. If you need to select a large area of your image quickly, high tolerance numbers can help you a lot. However, to get that help you sacrifice some control over which colours get stencilled. Of course, you can always go back and adjust the stencil with the Fine Tune option as you'll see below. Fine Tuning the Stencil Now that you've seen how to add to the stencil and use the Tolerance setting, we'll take a quick look at fine tuning the stencil. We're going to use Fine Tune to subtract a colour from your stencil, but you can also use Fine Tune to add colours to the stencil. Click the Fine Tune option to turn it on. Activate the screen by left clicking on one of the greens not in your stencil. Move the cursor over to the middle of the stencilled grass and click with the right mouse button to subtract a colour. Deluxe Paint recalculates your stencil and shows your stencil with the colour removed. Fine Tune lets you add or subtract single colours from your locked set without having to change the tolerance level. Fine Tune always adds or substracts only the colour you click on, though you are certainly welcome to click on wharever colours you like. Tutorial Six: Textures and Media Deluxe Paint and its creator have always tried to bring the best and latest computer graphics trends to all Amiga users. One of the latest trends has been to emulate natural media printing and compositing. Every major computer platform has a print program that emulates natural media. We are the first commercial Amiga program to bring natural media painting and effects to all Amiga users, and no special additional hardware or files are needed. In this section you will learn how to use textured backgrounds, media libraries and how to best combine these tools with other Deluxe Paint features to create some interesting natural looking artwork. Switch Screen format to Lo Res HAM. Load the file TextureMap.Lores from the Picture drawer of the Examples disk. Click No if the program asks you to change modes Select Palette>Default Palette from the Colour Menu. Your map should turn to two shades of grey and black. Open the Ranges colour panel or press Ctrl-c Click to range 2, then press the CLEAR button if there is a range defined. Select the light blue colour in your palette (colour 10) and place it in the left most bead line. Slide the Range slider below the bead line all the way to the right. Select the purple colour in your palette (colour 13) and place it on the right most bead line. You should now have a gradient that goes from light aqua colour to a deep purple colour. Click OK to close the ranges colour panel. Now let's create a stencil to lock out the continent when we do a gradient rectangle fill. Select Stencil>Make from the Effects menu or press the - key to bring up the Make Stencil requester Click the Fine Tune check box, and left click on any continent (the dark grey colour) Click on the Make button in the requester to create a stencil for the continents. Select Texture>On/Off from the Effect menu. (When you select this choice for the first time in your work session, Deluxe Paint will automatically bring up the Load Texture window and turn on the texture for you once it is loaded). Select the Brush Stroke texture from the textures directory of the Media disk. You now have a textured background loaded into memory. Right click on the Filled Rectangle tool to bring up the Fill Type requester Choose the standard Vertical Fill and the Smooth Dither gradient Make sure the blue gradient you created is the current gradient. Click OK to choose the filled rectangle tool. Press F10 to turn off the Menus and Toolbox Take your cursor and create a filled rectangle from the bottom right corner of your image to the top left corner of your image. In a moment you will see that Deluxe Paint has allowed you to create a textured fill with a gradient. You need not combine the texture with a gradient, but as you can see the effect is a very nice one. You can repeat this process one or two more times and Deluxe Paint will act as if you are building up layers of paint on a textured background. You won't need your stencil anymore, so choose Stencil>Free from the Effect Menu. Select Texture>Load from the Effect menu and load the EmbossedHair texture file. Press F10 to turn on the toolbar if it isn't on already. Select the light green colour in your toolbox palette. Bring up the Fill Type requester by right clicking on the fill tool or pressing F (Shift-f). Choose Solid and click OK to choose the Fill tool. Click on the continent of Africa with the Fill tool. You should see a hair-like texture fill the area you clicked on. Choose another colour, load up another texture and fill another continent or go on to the next step when you are ready - don't let us interrupt your creative endeavours. Press j to swap to the spare page or select Spare>Swap from the Picture Menu. Load the WorldMap.Lores file from the Picture drawer of the Examples disk. Click No at the change format message. Press j to swap back to your TextureMap image. Load the Wall file from the textures drawer of the Media disk. Turn on translucency (Alt-t). It should be set to 50% by default. Select Rub Thru from the Mode Menu. Press F10 to turn off the menus and toolbar. Select the sketch tool (press s) and start rubbing through part of North America. Because you have translucency on you are not rubbing through a full opaque image only 50% of the image (or whatever your translucency settings are) rubs through. The amount rubbed through is also being affected by the texture currently loaded. You can turn off the texture to see the difference in how it reacts as you paint. You can also try different combinations of having the translucency off, process on, etc. Select Colour from the Mode menu or press F2. Now let's see what effect media types have on images. Please note that media type libraries will not work by themselves, they require that you have a texture loaded into Deluxe Paint V. Select Media>Open... from the Effect menu and load the file Chalk from the media drawer of the media disk. Choose the Sketch tool or your preferred drawing tool and start drawing some lines on the screen. You'll notice that you get a slow build-up of colour depending on what your current colour is and what texture you have loaded. Change your foreground colour and draw again. Load the felttip media library as you did the chalk one. Drawing on the screen with this media library will affect the colours underneath your brush more rapidly than the chalk brush, and the colours under your brush will lean to dark values very quickly, just as a dirty felt tip pen going over other colours would. The other media libraries will give you different effects. Oil will mix much more with the colours underneath your brush just like an Oil Pastel. Water colour will give you a soft textured tint of the current foreground colour. Experiment with these and any other media libraries, we've made Media libraries and Textures as flexible and customisable as possible. The combina tions of effects in Deluxe Paint V are endless, so be creative and experiment with as much of the program as you can. With a little practice you'll be creating digital masterpieces in no time. Tutorial Seven: Using Macros In the following tutorial, you'll learn how to record your actions as macros. Once you record a macro, you can save it to a file, edit it, and execute it as many times as you need. Macros are great timesavers for repetitive tasks. Recording Your Actions The Record Macro command lets you record your keyboard and mouse actions and save them as a macro you can execute from the User menu Menu Commands Sure, Deluxe Paint has many keyboard shortcuts, but there are probably some menu commands that you use frequently that don't have a built in keyboard shortcut. You can create your own macros to bring up requesters at the touch of a button. Let's create a macro for bringing up the Load Media requester. Choose Record Macro from the Macro menu. Your actions are auto matically recorded from the time you select this menu command (and the menu item is checked while recording) to the moment you reselect Record Macro. Choose Effect>Media>Open to open the Load Media requester. Select a Media file if you wish to open one; otherwise click Cancel (it doesn't matter which action you take for the purposes of our macro) You can record your mouse and keyboard actions when using Deluxe Paint menus and requesters, but you can't record file specific actions such as opening a Media file. That's why it doesnt matter whether you click OK or Cancel in the preceding step. Choose Macro>Record Macro again to stop recording the macro. The Assign Macro requester appears. Select macro slot Macro #1 and press OK. To test the macro you just created, select User>Macro #1 (or type A-1) thc Load Media requester appears. You just created a macro! For the remainder of your Deluxe Paint session, you can type A-1 to bring up the Load Media requester without having to select it from the Effect menu. Automatic Signature Let's try something a little more fun. How about recording your signature so you can automatically put your signature on a painting? Make sure that the Record Details option in the Macro menu is not checked (it is checked by default) this will reduce the size of our macro file. Choose Record Macro from the Macro menu Click on the smallest brush in the toolbox (the 1-pixel brush in the upper left corner). Write your name in the lower right corner of the screen. Choose Macro>Record Macro again to stop recording the macro. The Aasign Macro requester appears. Select macro slot Macro #2 and press OK. Clear the screen, and then select User>Macro #2 (or type A-2). Your signature is written on the lower right corner of the screen. Recording your signature is hardly the most useful task you can assign to a macro. Try recording and saving actions such as drawing a figure and then cutting it out as a brush. Saving And Loading Macros Now that we've recorded a couple of macros, let's experiment with saving and loading macros. Saving a Macro The macros you've created so far are stored only in RAM - if you exit the program, they will be lost. Let's save the first macro to disk so we can permanently assign it to a macro slot. Select Save As... from the Macro menu. The Save Macro requester appears. Click the Macro #1 radio button, and then click OK. A standard Amiga save requester appears. Type the filename LoadMedia.dprx in the File text gadget. (Macpaint the brush. Press 0 on the keypad to return to the brush to its original orientation. When you use the Shift key with one of the keypad keys, the brush rotates by the Angle Step. The default Angle Step is 90 degrees, but you can change it to any angle you like in the Perspective requester. Choose Perspective>Settings from the Effect menu to display this requester, or right click on the Grid tool while you are in Perspective mode. When using perspective, 90 degrees is the most coe first macro slot. Select Load... from the Macro menu. The Load Macro requester appears. You may notice that our LoadMedia.dprx file is in fact already placed in the Macro #1 slot. Deluxe Paint automatically places the macro file in the appropriate slot when you save a macro. But we'll pretend that you're loading a macro file from the beginning. Each of the ten macro slots has a question mark (?) to its right. Clicking this button brings up an Amiga file load requester for the respective macro slot. Click the button to the right (of Macro #1. A Load Macro file load requester appears. Double click on the file LoadMedia.dprx. The macro file we created above is selected, and you return to the Load Macro requester. Click OK to accept the macro assignment You have now created a permanent macro file and assigned it to the first macro slot. However, if you quit the program now, no macros will be assigned when Deluxe Paint is restarted. If you want to save your macro assignments permanently, choose Prefs>Save to save all your Deluxe Paint preferences settings as tooltypes. Only macro files that have been assigned to macro slots are saved as tooltypes. If a macro has been created in memory but not saved to a file and assigned to a slot, the macro will be lost even if you save your preferences before you exit Deluxe Paint. In this tutorial you've learned how to record your actions and save them to macro files that can be assigned to keyboard shortcuts. However, you can do much more with ARrexx macro files than simply record and play back your actions. You can also write your own macro scripts from scratch, or edit macro files recorded in Deluxe Paint. See the Appendix F for more on the world of ARexx macros. This section explaines Deluxe Paints powerful Perspective mode. Perspective lets you paint in three dimensions, which can give your pictures a true feel ing of depth. perspective is a complex feature, so we strongly recommend that you become familiar with the program before you venture into this area. We've tried to make this explanation as clear as possible, but be sure that the steps we list assume that you understand other program features. Three Dimensional Model When you paint in Perspective mode, you are working with a three-dimen- sional representation of the two dimensional space that is available on your screen. To visualise this model it might help to think of your computer screen as the front side of a box. Usually, when you paint, the mouse moves your brush in only two directions; horizontally and vertically. But when you move and rotate your brush in Perspective mode, you add a third direction to the motion backward and forward. To move the brush into the distance or towards you, you'll move it on the Z axis of th system shown above. You'll learn more about the coordinate system later in this chapter. For now just remember that in its default settings, the screen coordinates operate as shown in Figure 5.1; the axis runs horizontally across the screen, the Y axis runs vertically and the Z axis runs backward into the screen Rotating a Brush in 3D Space The key to working in Perspective is rotating the brush. In this brief section, we'll show you how to rotate your brush using the numeric keypad. Before you begin, you need a brush to rotate. Load the Dolphin brush from the Media disk. If you are NOT in HAM, choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. If you are in HAM, move to the next step. After you have a brush, you can enter Perspective mode. Choose Perspective>Do from the Effect menu to enter the Perspective mode. A small cross hair appears in the middle of the screen to indicate the Perspective Centre (or line of view), and your brush is enclosed in a wire frame with a large cross-hair over it. In our example, you will also see three zeros on the right half of the Title Bar. These indicate the current rotation angles of the brush. The numbers are all zeros because we haven't rotated the brush yet. The cross hair on your brush makes any brush rotations easier to see, and it will help you position the brush when it changes sizes. An important feature of the cross hair is that it indicates the X and Y axes of the brush. The Z axis of the brush runs perpendicular to the other two axes, just like the screen's Z axis. Figure 5,3 shows the Brush axis system. To rotate the brush, use the numeric keypad on the right side of your keyboard. Figure 5.4 shows how each of the keys rotates the brush. All numerical keystrokes in Perspective mode refer to the numeric keypad. You'll use the keypad to rotate images. Sometimes you'll use the Shift key in combination with the keypad to rotate an object a fixed number of degrees (more about this in Angle Step, below). We'll try each of the rotations in the next few steps so you get a feel for moving in 3D. We'll start off with the simplest rotation, that is, a rotation on the Z axis with the brush in its normal 0,0,0 orientation. This is the simplest rotation, because no part of the brush moves off the plane of your computer screen. Hold down 2 on the keypad for about 5 seconds. The Dolphin disappears and the wire frame rotates clockwise on its centre (the position of the pointer). Notice that the third number along the right side of the Title Bar has increased as the rotation angles increased. Figure 5.5 illustrates rotation on the Z axis. Press 1 repeatedly until the numbers along the right side of the Title Bar show 0, 0, 0 as the brush rotation. When the brush is back to the 0,0,0 position, the Dolphin reappears inside the frame. This is a handy visual cue that the brush is at its orientation. Later, when you begin moving the brush in three dimensional space, you'll see that the same rule applies to movement - if the brush is back on its original plane it reappears inside the frame. Displaying the brush is dependent on memory availability your brush may not appear even when in its original orientation if it is large or memory availability is low. Rotating on the other axes works just like rotating on Z, but when you rotate on the other axes, the brush moves off the plane of the screen and into the third dimension. Let's see how this works by rotating on X. Move (don't drag) the brush to the lower left corner of the screen. Hold down 7 on the keypad. When the brush frame has rotated to about -45 dgrees, release the 7 key, and click to paint the brush. As you rotate the brush on the X axis, it appears as though the top half of the brush is turning into the screen and the bottom half is turning outward. As a result, your painted brush is set at an angle to the screen as shown in Figure 5.6. To return your brush to its original orientation, press 0. Resetting the Brush Rotation The last step introduced an important keystroke. Any time you need to reset the brush to its original orientation of 0,0,0, press 0 on the keypad. If you get lost in the world of 3D, you can always get back to the beginning with this simple keystroke. The Angle Step To rotate on the Y axis, you use 4 and 5 on the keypad. This time we'll use the Shift key to rotate by a larger increment, automatically. Move your brush to the lower right corner of the screen. Hold down the Shift key and press 4 on the keypad. Your brush instantly rotates 90 degrees on the Y axis. Click to paint the brush. Press 0 on the keypad to return to the brush to its original orientation. When you use the Shift key with one of the keypad keys, the brush rotates by the Angle Step. The default Angle Step is 90 degrees, but you can change it to any angle you like in the Perspective requester. Choose Perspective>Settings from the Effect menu to display this requester, or right click on the Grid tool while you are in Perspective mode. When using perspective, 90 degrees is the most common angle, so leave it there for now. Click OK to return to the painting screen. Rotation around the Handle When you rotate a brush in Perspective, the rotation always occurs around the brush handle to the preceding examples, the brush was held by the centre (the default position), so the rotations always occurred around the centre of the brush. Let's look at the difference between rotation around the centre and rotation around the corner of the brush. Click CLR to clear the screen. Position the brush near the middle of the screen. Hold down the Shift key and press 2 on the keypad to rotate 90 degrees on the Z axis. Press Shift 2 three more times to set the brush back to 0,0,0 or press 3 on the keypad to reset the Z axis. You've seen this rotation before, but we had you repeat it to compare this with rotation around the corner of the brush. Keep the brush in the same location. Press Alt-x on the keyboard. This moves the brush so that it is held by the lower right corner. Note the position of the arrow cursor. You can also do this by choosing Handle>Rotate from the Brush menu. Press Shift-2 to rotate the brush around the new handle position. Figure 5.8 illustrates the difference between rotation around the centre and rotation about the corner. So far in our discussion of brush rotations, we've always rotated the brush on one of the two possible coordinate systems. If you look back to Figure 5.7, you'll see that below Angle Step in the Perspective requester there is an item labelled Type with two buttons: Screen and Brush. We've been rotating in the Screen coordinate system. In the next few steps, we'll demonstrate the difference between the two rotation systems. INFORMATION If you are familiar with rotation systems, you'll recognise that this Screen coordinate system is based on Euler angles. Before beginning this brief example, make sure your screen is clear. When it is: Choose Handle>Rotate from the Brush menu (or press Alt-x until your handle is at the centre); and press o to reset your brush to its original orientation. To make this example clearer, it will help if the Angle Step is set to something other than 90 degrees. In the next step we'll have you change it to 45 degrees. Choose Perspective>Settings from the Effect menu (or right click the Grid icon) to display the Perspective requester. Click in the right side of the Angle Step edit field, backspace to erase the 90 setting and type 45. Click OK to close the requester and use the new setting. Now let's try a rotation in the screen coordinate system: Position your brush in the lower left corner of the screen. Press Shift-2 to rotate 45 degrees on the Z axis. Now press Shift-7 to rotate -45 degrees on the X axis. Click to paint the brush down. Notice that when you rotated the brush on the X axis, the Screen's axis was used. The brush's X axis was tilted sideways, but the brush still rotated back ward into the screen. Also notice that the rotation angles appear in the Title Bar. NOW we change see the difference. Right click the Grid tool to display the Perspective requester. Click the button labelled Brush and click OK. Press 0 to reset your brush to its original orientation. Position the brush in the lower right corner of the screen. Press Shift-2 to rotate 45 degrees on the Z axis. Now press Shift-7 to rotate 45 degrees (or the X axis. Click to paint the brush down. In the Brush coordinates system, rotations always take place about the brush axes, regardless of the current orientation of the brush. In this example, the X axis was positioned diagonally after you rotated 45 degrees on the Z axis; as a result, the brush rotated on the diagonal axis instead of rotating straight backward into the screen. You'll also notice that the angles shown in the Title Bar are not the angles that you rotated. The Title Bar always shows the rotation angles for the Screen coordinate system. This allows you to reproduce your brush rotation by switching to Screen angles and rotating the amounts indicated in the Title Bar. Deluxe Paint offers both Screen and Brush coordinate systems for rotation, because each of the systems has unique merits: The Screen coordinates system is often consistent with the notion of the three screen coordinates defining the 3D space. More importantly, the Screen coordinates system is reproducible: you can jot down the rotation numbers in the Menu Bar and reproduce the same brush orientation simply by rotating to the same angles. The results of multiple rotations are the same no matter what order you rotate in. The Brush coordinates system is usually easier to visualise if you are rotat ing at angles other than 90. So you can usually produce the desired brush orientation without much difficulty. Unfortunately, the cumulative effect of separate rotations on the brush axes are not reproducible unless you make the exact same rotations in the exact same order. You'll notice that the angles given in the Menu Bar when you rotate using the Brush coordinates are actually the angles for the Screen coordinates system: this is so you will be able to reproduce your brush rotation, though you will have to use Screen angles to do it. Now that you've seen how to rotate your brush in three dimensions, the next section will show you the ins and outs of moving a brush around in all three dimensions. Moving in 3D Space Before you begin this section clear the screen. Choose Perspective>Reset from the Effect menu to reset all perspective settings, including Angle Type, to their defaults. Load the brush named Block.brush from the Media disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Make sure you are in Perspective mode. Moving on the Z axis. When your brush is in its original orientation (0, 0, 0), moving your mouse moves your brush along the X and Y axes. Try it right now: Move your mouse forward and watch how your brush moves up on the screen. Move your mouse backward and your brush moves down on the screen. Likewise, moving the mouse left or right moves the brush left or right. Because your mouse can move in only two dimensions (the third direction would require you to lift it off the desk), it can move your brush in only two directions. you can move your brush in the third dimension by using the keyboard. One method is to move the brush straight back along the Z axis only: Position your brush in the lower left corner of the screen, hold down the Shift key and press the quote key (") several times. Each time you press Shift-" the brush moves backward along the Z axis. It appears as though the brush is getting smaller but in fact it is moving away from the front of the screen. To move the brush forward along the Z axis, you use the colon key(:). Hold down the Shift key and press the colon key (:) once. Notice that the " and : keys move the brush toward and away from the cross hair in the middle of the screen. This cross hair defines the Perspective Centre, which is best thought of as the point of view. No matter where you place the brush in the screen, if you move the brush using the quote key, the brush will move into the distance and toward the Perspective Centre. When you use Perspective, you'll often want to move your brush backwards and left and right along a plane. The effect is of a brush moving across the floor. Deluxe Paint lets you do this by holding down ates and take note of the cursor position before you rotate your brush, you'll be able to recreate the perspective plane exactly. Press Shift Keypad 7 to rotate the brush 90 degrees on X. Notice that at this point you don't have angles in your Title Bar. You can turn off Coordinates if you want to see the angles, but you don't need them for this exercise, since all of our movements are on 90 degrees and based on sight, not numbers. Choose Perspective>FillScreen from the Effect menu. Buildin you are in Perspective mode. This is useful if you need to align your brush precisely. Press the \ key and look at what happens to the angles in the right side of the Title Bar. Now hold down the Ctrl key and move the mouse for ward and backward. Pressing the \ key toggles the Display option in the Perspective requester between Angle and Pos (position) Press the \ key again to return to displaying angles in the Title Bar. Laying Down the Brush to move in 3D. Another way to move into the distance is to lay the brush down and then move it on its own Y axes. Rotating the brush 90 degrees on its X axis makes the brushes Y axes act like the screens Z axis. Figure 5.11 shows what happens to the different axes during perspective rotation. Let's try it once to see how it works. Press 0 to reset the brush to its original orientation and position the brush in the lower left corner of the screen. Press Shift-keypad 7 to flop the brush down into the screen. Now move the mouse around. You will quickly discover that moving the mouse forward and backward moves the brush into the screen and back out instead of up and down. This is because the mouse moves the brush on the plane defined by the brush's X and Y coordinates. Move the brush to any new position and press Shift-keypad 8 to turn it back up on end. Paint the brush down. Use the combination of Shift-keypad 7 and Shift-keypad 8 several times until you are comfortable with how these keys help you move in the third dimension. Perspective Plane You might have noticed that when you flopped the brush down by rotating on its X axis, the brush moved on a plane below the Perspective Centre. Remember that when the brush is in its original 0,0,0 orientation, it moves on a plane that is roughly the equivalent of the computer screen. When you rotate the brush, you change the orientation of the plane. The plane can be at almost any angle to Perspective Centre. The easiest way to see this is to fill the perspective plane you've defined. Press 0 to reset your brush. Position the brush so that your cursor is at the bottom of the screen. Press Shift-7 to rotate the brush on the X axis. Choose Perspective>FillScreen from the Effect menu and watch as Deluxe Paint fills the perspective plane with a pattern of your brush. The results of this last step should look something like Figure 5.12 As we said, you can set your perspective plane at almost any angle to the Perspective Centre. In the next step, we'll draw a plane to the right of centre with the brush rotated sideways. This will create a "wall" on the right. Press 0 to reset your brush to its original orientation. Place the brush in the lower right corner of the screen. Press Shift-4 to turn the brush into the screen. Choose Perspective>FillScreen from the Effect menu. Practice creating different planes. For example, position the brush above perspective centre to create a "ceiling" from your brush. The Perspective Horizon The position of perspective centre plays an important role in determining the angle of the plane to the viewer. It also determines the horizon point. The horizon point is the farthest edge of the plane when you rotate a brush to 90 degrees. To demonstrate how this works, we'll load a picture that has a horizon and fill the plane out to the horizon. Load the picture Seascape from the Examples disk and choose Palette>Default Palette from the Colour menu. You might remember this picture from the Guided Tour. In the picture, the ocean stretches to a flat horizon on the right side. We'll set our Perspective Centre in line with this horizon and then fill a perspective plane. Choose Perspective>Centre from the Effect menu. Your cursor changes to a large cross hair. Position the cross hair so that it is halfway across the screen and so the horizontal line of the cross-hair lines up with exactly the horizon in the picture. Click to place the perspective centre. Now load your Block.brush brush, and enter Perspective mode. Press Shift-7 to rotate your brush 90 degrees. Choose Perspective>FillScreen from the Effect menu to fill the per spective plane. When you are done, your screen should look like Figure 5.13. Notice that the horizon of your perspective plane exactly matches the horizon of the original picture. The Angle of the Plane In the example above, the perspective plane matches the horizon because you rotated the brush by 90 degrees. If you had rotated by more than 90 degrees the plane would not reach the horizon, as though the plane sloped downward If you had rotated by less than 90 degrees the plane would extend above the horizon as though it sloped upward like a mountain. It is difficult to see the differences unless you have an existing horizon to compare the plane with. Without an existing horizon, the sloping of the plane will appear to be only a difference in the distance between the position of the brush and the perspective centre when the brush was rotated. When you create a perspective plane, the position and angle of the plane are determined by three things: The position of the Perspective Centre. The position of the brush handle (cursor) when you rotate the brush. And the degree of rotation. In our examples above, we rotated the brush in 90 degree increments so the plane was always either parallel to our point of view or at a right angle. If you want to create a sloping surface, you do so by rotating the brush to an angle less than 90 degrees. Here's a quick example: Choose Perspective>Reset from the effect menu or press Shift-keypad 0. Position your brush so that the cursor is at the very bottom of the screen. Hold down 7 on the keypad until the brush has rotated -60 degrees on the X axis. Move the mouse forward and backward to see how the brush moves on this new plane. You'll notice that the vanishing point of the brush is above the horizon in your picture, this is because the plane is not parallel to the point of view. It is as though you were looking at a gradual incline. Putting Things in Perspective We've covered the fundamentals of perspective. Now it's time to put what you've learned into practice. In this exercise, we'll create a perspective land scape and build a three dimensional arch as shown in Figure 5.14. In the process you'll learn some of the tricks about using perspective that you can only understand when you see them in context. Creating the Plane The first step of our tutorial is to create a perspective plane. You don't need to create a plane every time you use perspective. We're doing it here, so you can readily see the "depth" of your picture. Load the Block.brush brush from the Media disk. Notice that this brush is held by the lower right corner. If you expect to use a brush in Perspective, it is best to save the brush with the handle in the lower right corner for two reasons: 1. Rotations always occur around the handle, so holding the brush in the corner helps make the rotations consistent and useful. 2. If you establish a Perspective grid, you can make all of your brushes conform to that grid if their handles are in the same corner. Choose Coords (short for Coordinates) from the Prefs menu or press the | key (Shift \) Press the Enter key on the keypad to enter Perspective mode. Position the cursor at 196, 25 and press Shift-G, which turns on the grid and uses 196, 25 as one of the grid points. If you turn on Coordinates and take note of the cursor position before you rotate your brush, you'll be able to recreate the perspective plane exactly. Press Shift Keypad 7 to rotate the brush 90 degrees on X. Notice that at this point you don't have angles in your Title Bar. You can turn off Coordinates if you want to see the angles, but you don't need them for this exercise, since all of our movements are on 90 degrees and based on sight, not numbers. Choose Perspective>FillScreen from the Effect menu. Building the Arch Load the RedBlock brush from the Media disk. A this point you are no longer in Perspective mode, but the Grid is still on. Press the Enter key on the keypad to enter Perspective mode. Your brush is automatically laid down on the perspective plane in the same orientation you left it in last (that is, rotated 90 degrees on the X axis) This is an important point to remember, because it means that you can easily bring in new brushes at the right perspective simply by loading them with the per spective plane defined by the previous brush. You'll notice that the grid has been adjusted to your new brush size. It is not necessarily true that your new brush will line up currectly with the grid point you used to define the plane (196, 25), because the brush handle is tied to the closest grid point when you enter perspective and there is a three-in four chance that it will be tied to one of the other corners. If you want the brush to line up with the grid point you specified when you created the grid, press Keypad 0 to reset the brush to 0, 0, 0 orientation, align the handle with the grid point, and rotate the brush again. If you don't want your perspective grid automatically sized to new brushes, turn off the AutoGrid option in the Prefs menu. Press G to turn off the Grid so you can move the brush freely on the plane. Position the brush so that the Y axis of the brush is aligned with the Perspective Centre and the bottom of the brush is aligned with the edge of the second full row of tile on the floor. (The coordinates will show this point as 175, 46). Press Shift-G to turn on the grid and use your new handle position as one of the grid points. Press Shift Keypad 8 to rotate the brush up on the X axis. Move the brush two grid points to the left and stamp it down. Paint the brush three times above the current brush position so you create the face of a column. Paint the brush four times to the right to form the top of the arch and the top of the right column. Then paint the brush three times down to form the right column. At this point you have a two dimensional arch on a three dimensional plane. Our next task is to give the arch a third dimension. Move the brush so that it is directly on the bottom block of the left column of your arch. Press Shift Keypad 4 to rotate the brush -90 degrees on the y axis. Paint the brush where it is and twice above to form the left side of the column. Move the mouse a bit to the right to move the brush back along its x axis and paint another set of blocks so your column is one block wide at the face and two blocks deep as shown in Figure 5.14. Press Shift Keypad 5 to rotate the brush back on its Y axis so that it is facing you head on. If the brush is not the same size as the facing blocks of your arch, hold down the Ctrl key and move the mouse for ward or backward to bring it closer or move it back. As we explained in Chapter Five, Using Perspective, the Ctrl key temporarily fixes the Y axis of your brush so that you can move it on its Z axis. As you become adept at painting in Perspective, you'll find yourself using this key often. Position the brush to the left of the bottom block of the right column Press Alt-x to change the brush handle to the other side of the brush. Your brush jumps so that it is over the bottom block of the right column, but the, brush is now held by the lower left corner. Remember that Alt-x repositions your brush handle. This keyboard equivalent is especially useful while working in Perspective, since you usually don't want to move your mouse to choose from the menu. Press Shift Keypad 5 to rotate the brush 90 degrees on the Y axis. Paint the brush where it is and twice above to form the left side of the column Paint another column just behind this first one so your column is one block wide at the face and two blocks deep. Press Shift Keypad 4 to rotate the brush back on the Y axis. If the brush is not the same size as the facing blocks of your arch, hold down the Ctrl key and move the mouse forward or backward to bring it clos- er or move it back. Move the brush up so that it is over the block in the upper left corner of the arch. Press Shift-Keypad 7 to rotate the brush -90 degrees on the X axis. Move the brush to the right and stamp it once below each of the three blocks that form the top of the arch. Paint another row just behind this first row so the top of your arch is one block high and two blocks deep. Now your arch is complete and should look just like the arch in Figure 5.14. Inserting the Seascape Picture To give your perspective painting a bit more colour, and a landscape for the background, we'll load the Seascape picture and add it behind the arch. Choose Spare>Swap from the Picture menu to display the spare page (or press j). Load the Seascape picture from the Picture drawer on your Examples disk. Choose Palette>Default Palette from the Colour menu. Jump back to your main page (press or choose Spare>Swap from the Picture menu). Choose Spare>Merge in back from the Picture menu. In a flash, your arch has a nice seascape backdrop. This exercise gave you a quick example of perspective, but you can do a lot more. For an excellent example of perspective at work, load the picture New Star-Hall on your Examples disk. This chapter introduces you to Deluxe Paint V's animation features. It begins by explaining the basic model for animation and then covers such as the different ways to create animations with the program. We recommend that you work through this chapter in one sitting. It will take you approxi mately 45 minutes to complete. Before You Begin If you've been experimenting with Deluxe Paint for a while before starting this chapter it would be a good idea to quit the program and restart. If you start the program fresh, there is less chance that the results you get from fol lowing our instructions will be different from what we describe. When the Choose Screen Format requester appears, select Lo-Res, 320x200, and 32 colours, and click Use. The Basic Model The basic idea behind animation in Deluxe Paint is that instead of having a single page to paint on, you have multiple pages that you can paint on and flip through. By creating images that differ slightly from page to page and then playing them back in rapid succession, you create the illusion of motion This section shows you how to: Create frames for your animation Paint on individual frames in the animation Paint while the frames are flipping - this is called Animpainting Use the Animation Control Panel Creating Frames The first step in building an animation is to create the frames to paint on Choose Frames>Set # from the Anim menu. The Set Frame Count requester appears. Click in the count edit box, change the frame count to 10 and click OK. You now have 10 frames to paint on. Notice the numbers 1/10 at the left side of the Title Bar. This means you are positioned on the first frame of a 10 frame animation. Painting One Frame at a Time The most basic way to create an animation is to paint on each successive frame individually. Select the largest round built-in brush and paint a dot in the upper left area of your screen The dot you just placed is on frame 1. The trick of animation in Deluxe Paint is to paint a slightly different picture on successive frames. So you need to move to the next frame. Choose Control>Next from the Anim menu to move to frame 2. of the two memory methods in Reference. Simple Moves in Three Dimensions The Move requester does exactly what its name implies - it moves your brush on the screen. There are many impressive animations you can create with only the Move requester and a brush like our DPaint Title brush, but to create those impressive animations, you need to know how each feature of the Move requester works. This brief section explains the most basic Moves. Stamp your brush in the centre of the screen. C menu beside the options). Follow the numbered steps below and we'll use keyboard equivalents to complete and play our little animation. 1. Position your brush just to the right of the dot you painted on frame 2. 2. Press 2 on the keyboard once to advance to the next frame, then click to paint a new dot. 3. Repeat step 2, painting each dot to the right of the previous one, until your first dot appears again in the left side of the screen. (The Title Bar will show 1/10 as your frame position). You've just created a brief animation. Now let's play it. 4. Choose Control>Play from the Anim menu (or press 4 at the top of the keyboard). You should see your dot moving from left to right across the screen. 5. To stop the animation, press the space bar. Animation Control Panel Selecting animation options from the Anim menu or using keyboard equiv- alents for those commands are only two of the ways Deluxe Paint has for controlling your animations. Those two methods are handy but perhaps the most efficient way to control your animation is through the Animation Control Panel. Select Control>Panel from the Anim menu The Animation Control Panel appears at the bottom of the screen. It's use- ful to have it visible while you work on your animation sequence. If you want to remove it while you're animating, choose Control>Panel from the Anim menu again. (Notice that there are check marks next to items when they're on; no check mark when they're off). The Control Panel contains a Frame slider, scroll arrows, and fifteen control buttons for working through and playing with your animation. Frame Slider The Frame slider helps you keep track of where you are in your animation sequence, when you've hidden the Title Bar. Even when the Title Bar is showing you can move to a specific frame by dragging the slider or by click ing on it. One click to the left or right of the slider handle moves the ani mation one frame. Clicking on the scroll arrows will take you to the first (left arrow) or last (right arrow) frame. Anim Control Buttons Play Backwards Continuously Play your animation sequence in a continuous loop, from last frame to first frame. Press the space bar or click to stop play. Play Backward Once Click to play through your animation sequence one time, from the last frame to frame 1. Animation ends on the first frame. Previous Frame Click to move backward one frame. Steps from the current frame to the pre vious frame in the animation sequence. If the current frame is the first framc in the sequence, the position is set to the last frame. Next Frame Click to move forward one frame. Steps the current frame to the next frame in the animation sequence. If the current frame is the last frame in the sequence, the position is set to the first frame. Play Forward Once Click to play through your animation sequence one time, from Frame 1 to the last frame. Animation ends on the last frame. Play Forward Continuously Play your animation sequence in a continuous loop, from first frame to last frame. Press the space bar or click to stop play. Play Ping Pong Plays your animation sequence continuously as above, but plays the sequence forward then backward then forward and so on. Press the space bar or click to stop play. Add a Frame Adds a frame after the current frame, and copies the contents of the current frame to it. Press Ctrl while choosing this icon to bring up the Add Frames requester. Delete a Frame Deletes the current frame and makes the following frame the current frame (unless you're already at the last frame). Press Ctrl while choosing this icon to bring up the Delete Frames requester. You can't UNDO a delete command, so Deluxe Paint asks you to confirm that you really want to delete a frame. Repeat Last Go To Takes you to the frame last defined in the Go To Frame requester (default = frame 1) of your animation. Press Ctrl while choosing this icon to bring up the go To Frame requester. The LightTable and the four associated icons on the right side of the Control Panel will be described later in this chapter. Painting With Animation You saw above that one way to create an animation in Deluxe Paint is to paint on a series of frames individually. For creating animations that involve simple movement of an object, Deluxe Paint provides a much easier method called animpainting. Essentially, the frames flip automatically while you paint. Right click CLR in the Toolbox. The Clear requester appears. HINT Left-clicking on CLR when there are animframes clears only the current frame. When you click CLR with multiple frames, Deluxe Paint gives you the option of clearing only the current frame, a range of frames in your animation, or all frames. Click All Frames in the requester. Click OK. In a moment all of your frames are cleared and you are automatically set back at frame 1. Now let's do some animpainting. Select the large round brush, and the Dotted Freehand tool Hold down the Alt key, and paint by holding down the left mouse but ton and dragging across the screen from left to right. As you paint, the frames flip automatically so you place only one dot on each frame of your animation. Notice that the frame counter in the Title Bar changes to show what frame you are on. When you reach the last frame you loop back to frame 1, where you'll see your first dot again. The Alt key is your animpainting key. If you hold down the Alt key at the time you press the mouse button down, the animation frames will flip with each stamp of the brush so that you stamp only once on each frame, Remember that you only need to hold down the Alt key as you press the mouse button down. Then you can release Alt to press other keys if you need to. After you have painted for a few seconds, stop and choose Control>Play from the Anim menu or press 4 on the keyboard You can also use the Animation Control Panel to activate any of the commands that are called for in this chapter. Press the space bar or click to stop the animation Now you know these basic elements of animation: How to create frames, How to move through the frames one by one and paint How to animpaint Animpainting is especially powerful if you have an animated brush to paint with: we'll show you how to create and use one later in this chapter. Right now we want to show you more ways to move objects on the screen Automatic Animation Using the Move Requester The Move requester lets you automatically move and rotate a brush over a number of animation frames. More importantly you can move and rotate the brush in all three dimensions. In essence, you are painting using Perspective, but Deluxe Paint makes all of the calculations for the individual frames. This section will take you through a detailed explanation of each feature of the Move requester and give examples for most of the features. To begin, right click CLR and clear All Frames from the previous animation sequence Choose Frames>Set # from the Anim menu. Change the frame count to 20, and click OK. Press Shift-1 to move to frame 1. Load the brush DPaint Title from the Brush Drawer Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. These instructions assume that your memory method (Method in the Anim menu) is set to Compressed - the default setting. Amigas with two megabytes of RAM can create only 9 to 10 frames using the Expanded method. You'll find a brief description of the two memory methods in Reference. Simple Moves in Three Dimensions The Move requester does exactly what its name implies - it moves your brush on the screen. There are many impressive animations you can create with only the Move requester and a brush like our DPaint Title brush, but to create those impressive animations, you need to know how each feature of the Move requester works. This brief section explains the most basic Moves. Stamp your brush in the centre of the screen. Choose Move from the Anim menu. The Move requester appears. The first row in the Move requester lists the three axes (X, Y and Z) in the three dimensional space of your screen. If you are familiar with Perspective you know that these axes run left and right, up and down, and in and out from the screen respectively. Figure 6.7 shows the orientation of the three axes to the screen. Directly below the X, Y, Z letters there are edit boxes for entering Distance (Dist:) numbers. You enter numbers here to tell Deluxe Paint how far to move your brush in any direction or combination of directions. (If your brush is moving only on the X and Y axes, the numbers are equal to pixels, but once you move along the Z axis, the units are either smaller or larger than pixels). Lets look at a simple example: Click in the Dist edit box below X and set the number to 200. Make sure that the Count edit box (in the middle of the requester) shows 20 as the current setting. If the number is not 20, click in the edit box and change the number. Click Preview to see a preview of the movement of your brush. You will see your brush enclosed in a wire frame move to the right across the screen. If you want your brush to move to the left, you enter a negative number for the X Distance. Try it. Set the X Dist edit box to -200. Click Preview. This time your brush moves to the left across the screen. A similar rule applies to the other two axes: Y Distance moves your brush upward if the number is positive and downward if the number is negative. Z Distance moves your brush out to the distance (away from you) if the number is pos itive or inward to the screen (coming toward you) if the number is negative You can use any combination of the three Dist edit boxes to move your brush anywhere in three dimensional space. Try it if you like. Set a number for each of the three boxes and click Preview to see where the brush would move. Simple Rotation In addition to moving the brush along an axis or several axes in combina tion, the Move requester lets you rotate the brush around one or more axes You rotate the brush by entering numbers in the Angle edit boxes. In the Move requester, click Zero, which clears all data from the Distance and Angle edit boxes. Click in the Z Angle edit box and enter 360 as the angle of rotation, (This tells Deluxe Paint that you want to rotate the brush 360' on the Z axis). Click Preview. You'll see a wire frame representation of your brush rotate clockwise on the screen. Just as negative numbers change the direction of movement when using Distance moves, negative numbers change the direction of rotation when you use Angle moves. Change the Z Angle setting to -360 degrees and click Preview. The wire frame rotates counter clockwise. If you're familiar with Deluxe Paint, you'll notice several new buttons here in the Move Requester that will make it easier for you to position and move your brushes around. Using the knowledge you learned about perspective in Chapter 5, you'll feel right at home with the way the key frame "Adjust" button works. Again using the DPaint Title brush, let's try it out. Click the Zero button to reset the distance and angle settings Select the Start key frame button and choose the Adjust key frame button. You will see a wireframe representation of the DPaint Title brush as if you were in perspective. While in this Adjust mode you can move your brush around and set the starting position you would like your brush in. Click and drag the brush to the top of your screen. Press Return or Enter (Either key will accept your position and exit you out of Adjust mode). Press the End key frame button and choose the Adjust button one more time. Click and drag the brush to the bottom of your screen. Press Return or Enter. Select the Preview button to see the move you just created. Notice that Deluxe Paint enters the distance for you automatically. You can edit the values manually as you learned in the previous section as well. The Fade slider will fade in or fade out your move using a translucency value between 0 and 255. 0 is full opaquness and 255 is full translucency. The effect Deluxe Paint will achieve for you is dependant on your palette and screen mode. The more colours to transition to full translucency the better the fade effect will be. You can have a fade value for both the Start key frame and the End key frame. As explained earlier, "Adjust" mode is very similar to perspective, not only can you move your brush in the screen's X and Y axes, you can also rotate your brush using the perspective rotation keys (1, 2, 4, 5, and 7, 8 on the keypad) and reset your axes using (3, 6, 9, and 0). In addition, you can move your brush in the Z distance by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking and dragging until you set the brush size to your liking. We hope the addition of setting Start and End key frames and the addition of a fade effect over a move will make it easier for you to create the animations in your head. Click Zero and try some brush rotation and moving your brush in the Z distance while in the adjust mode and press Preview to check it out before you move on to the next section. Have fun! Brush Check Boxes At this point you may be wondering about those two options labelled Brush beside the Distance and Angle edit boxes. The short answer is that these options determine whether your brush moves and rotates based on the screen axes or based on the brush axes. The default setting is for the brush to move along the screen axes and to rotate around the brush axes. To fully understand this feature, you'll need to be fimiliar with how Perspective, described in Chapter Five, works. We'll explain the Brush check boxes in more detail later in this chapter. For now just leave them as they are. The Go Back Command The Go Back button has a similar function to the Clear button, only it affects the location of the brush rather than the settings in the Move requester. When you use the Move requester to move your brush in three dimensional space, Deluxe Paint remembers the ending position of the brush when the move is complete. If you want to do a second move from the final brush position, click Go Back to reset the brush We'll show you the results of two different move paths, one without using Go Back and one using Go Back. In this example you'll also actually draw and play the animation instead of simply previewing it. Successive Moves without Go Back. Click Cancel in the Move requester. Click CLR and clear all frames (if you've been following the steps, the frame count should still be 20) Choose Perspective>Reset from the Effect menu to reset your brush to the original orientation. Position the brush at the bottom of the screen, and paint it down. Choose Move from the Anim menu to display the Move requester Click Zero to clear the edit boxes and then set the Y Distance to 200 and the Z Distance to 400. The frame count should be set to the number of frames you currently have. If it's not, make it so. Click Draw You just created the first part of the brush's movement, now we'll create the second part to continue from where the brush ended. Instead of choosing Move again, this time press Shift-m to display the Move requester. M is keyboard equivalent of choosing Move from the Anim menu. Set the X Distance to 800, leom the Anim menu (or press 6) to play the animation forward and backward You should see a bouncing ball. Press Tab for added effect. Let's take a moment to review what you just did. You positioned the Start and End frames to make the ball move from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen. When you entered 10 in the Slow Out edit box, you told Deluxe Paint that the brush should gradually increase its speed over the first 10 frames and then move at the same speed for the lasr ten. You the next set of steps, you'll use the same settings as the first example, but you'll also click the Go Back button before drawing the second part of the brush movement. Click CLR and clear all frames. This time press Shift-KeyPad 0 to reset your brush to the original orientation. Position the brush at the bottom of the screen, and paint it down. Press m to display the Move requester. Set the X Distance to 0, the Y Distance to 200, and the Z Distance to 400. Click Draw. Press m again. Set the X Distance to 800, leave the Y Distance at 200, ans set the Z Distance to 0. Click the Go Back button. Click Draw. When Deluxe Paint is finished drawing the animation, choose Control>Play from the Anim menu and watch your animation. This time you see your animation shows a title splitting into two, with one title moving into the distance and upward and the other moving diagonally off the screen to the right. Cyclic and Non-Cyclic Moves You use the Cyclic button to tell Deluxe Paint which of two kinds of animation you want: An animation that will loop back on itself (cycle) or chain from the current move to another move of a similar type: or An animation that is linear and will end at the last frame you requested in the Move requester. Deluxe Paint draws your move differently depending on whether or not the Cyclic button is selected. In this section we'll give you a very quick example of the difference between the two moves. Cyclic Animation Load any brush that contains features to help you tell whether or not the brush has been rotated. (The DPaint Title brush will do very well). Right-click CLR and clear all frames. Choose Perspective>Reset (or press Shift Keypad 0) to reset your brush to the original orientation. Stamp the brush in the upper half of the screen. Display the Move requester. Click Zero in the requester. Set the Z Angle to 360. Click the Cyclic button so a tick appears in the box. Click Draw. When Deluxe Paint is finished drawing your animation, notice that you are on frame 1 of your animation. Deluxe Paint moved you to the frame past the ending frame of your Count. Press Shift-2 to go to the last frame of the animation, (20/20 appears in Title Bar). Notice that on the last frame of your animation, the brush is not rotated 360 degrees, even though you asked for a 360 rotation in the Move requester. This is because Cyclic tells Deluxe Paint to create a "cyclical" animation one that completes the move on the same frame where it began. With this ani mation, you can play continuously without a seam. Press 4 and watch the animation for a moment. Press the space bar to stop the animation. Non-Cyclic Animation If Deluxe Paint had painted the brush fully rotared on the last frame, you would have the same image on frames 1 and 20, and the animation would hiccup when you played it continuously. Let's draw the same thing with Cyclic turned off to see how that works. Press Shift-1 to move to frame 1 of your animation. Paint your brush in the lower half of the screen. Display the Move requester. Click Cyclic to turn it off (remove the tick), and click Draw. Even as the new move is being drawn you can see that the new rotation is in larger steps than the first one. When the draw is complete, you will be left at frame 20, where you can see that the new move completed the 360 degree rota tion on frame 20 unlike the Cyclic move which left you on frame 1 Press 4 and watch the animation. Press the space bar to stop the anima tion. You should be able to see that the rotation at the top of the screen is smooth, but the rotation at the bottom of the screen hiccups noticeably. You might ask yourself at this point why anyone would want Cyclic turned off. The answer is simple: you might want to rotate exactly 90 degrees by a particular frame or you might want to move an object from point A to exactly point B. Generally if you are creating an animation sequence that runs for less than the full number of frames you have allocated for your animation, you don't want Cyclic turned on. For a clear example of why you would want Cyclic turned off follow the next set of steps. Clear all frames of your animation. Press Shift-2 to move to the last frame. Select the Unfilled Circle tool and the single-pixel brush and draw a small circle on the right side of the screen. Choose Coordinates from the Prefs menu to turn on Coordinates. The coordinates are displayed on the menu bar. Select the Dotted Freehand tool and the largest round built-in brush. Position the brush in the middle of your unfilled circle and note what the Coordinates show as the location of the brush. Move the brush 200 pixels to the left of that position, press Shift-1 to move to frame 1 and stamp down your brush. TIP When you need to move your brush in a straight line horizontally or vertically as you did in the step above, hold down the shift key. This constrains your cursor to horizontal or vertical movement depending on which direction you move in first. Display the Move requester, click Zero, set the X Distance to 200, make sure Cyclic is selected, and click Draw. When Deluxe Paint finishes drawing the animation, notice that you are left on frame 1. Now look at frame 20 (Press Shift-2). You'll see that even though the distance from where you stamped your brush to the centre of the circle was exactly 200 pixels and the move you requested was 200, the dot did not reach the centre of the circle. If you want to move your brush to a specific location by your ending frame, turn Cyclic off. Although you can't see it, Deluxe Paint has positioned the brush in the cen tre of the circle on frame 1. If you want to prove this, go to frame 20 and display the Move requester. Click 0, change the Count to 1, and click Draw When you complete a move with Cyclic selected, Deluxe Paint automatically advances you to the frame beyond the end of your Count and the brush position Deluxe Paint remembers is the position you specified in the Move requester. Smooth Moves Slowly The Slow Out and Slow In edit boxes let you specify a number of frames over which the brush can accelerate or decelerare in your animation. The primary advantage of these features is that you can make the brush move ment smooth at its beginning and ending points. Also, some effects require a gradual acceleration and deceleration to be realistic. For example, a bounc ing ball should accelerate on the way down. The bouncing ball is a good example of how this feature works, so let's try it. Clear all of your frames. Load the Ball.brush brush from your Brush direcrory and then choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Press h to halve the size of the ball. Display the Move requester. Click Zero to zero the location values, and then click Start. Click Adjust. The screen changes to a blank background with ball brush. Click and drag within the boundaries of the box that surrounds the brush and position the brush near the top of the screen. Press Enter or Return to accept the positioning and return to the Move requester. Click End, and then click Adjust again. This time, position the brush near the bottom of the screen. Press Enter or Return. Change the Slow Out Edit box to 10. Make sure the Count is set to 20, and then click Draw. The animation of the ball moving from the top to the bottom of the screen is created. After the animation is drawn, choose Control>Ping-pong from the Anim menu (or press 6) to play the animation forward and backward You should see a bouncing ball. Press Tab for added effect. Let's take a moment to review what you just did. You positioned the Start and End frames to make the ball move from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen. When you entered 10 in the Slow Out edit box, you told Deluxe Paint that the brush should gradually increase its speed over the first 10 frames and then move at the same speed for the lasr ten. You could have achieved the same effect by typing values into the X and Y edit boxes for the Start and End positions, but the method we used is simpler and more intuitive. More on the Move Requester What remains in the Move requester is fairly straightforward. For now we'll summarise what each of the buttons does. You'll find additional explanat ions and more examples of the features below, in the following chapter, and in Reference. Direction The Direction options control the direction of the move and the direction of the recording. The Go From button is the default setting for movement. With this option selecred, the settings in the Move requester are used to paint motion away from the point where you last stamped your brush. For example, an X Distance of 200 moves to the right from where you stamped your brush, over the number of frames set in the Set Number of Frames requester. With the Come To option selected, the settings in the Move requester are used to paint motion toward the point where you stamped your brush. For example, an X Distance of 200 moves to the right to where you stamped your brush. This option is most useful when it's easier to specify the posi- tion where you want the move to end than it is to specify the beginning. Remember that you want to stamp the brush on the frame you want your animated move to end on. Here's a practical example. Assembling the Pieces Suppose you want pieces of a picture to fly onto the screen and assemble neatly on the last frame. If the pieces are coming from off screen, it's diffi_ cult to position the brush there for the beginning of the move! And you don't want to calculate backwards from the ending position to figure out just where the starting position should be anyway. The answer is to go to the last frame, paint down your brush, and tell Deluxe Paint to paint the brush moving toward this point. That's what the Come To option is all about. Let's do it. Clear all frames. Choose Frames>Set # from the Anim menu and set the number of frames to 20. Press Shift- 2 to go to the last frame of the animation. Remember, when you use the Come To option, you always paint the brush down on the frame where you want the move to end. Choose Load from the Brush menu. Load the file named pie1.brush from the Media disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Paint the brush down in approximately the middle of the screen. Display the Move requester, and click Zero. Set the X distance to 200. Set the Y distance to -150. Set the Z angle to 180. Click the Come To option. Set Slow In to 5, and click Draw. Reset Slow Out to 0. Play the anim that you have so far. You'll see the piece of pie chart fly in from off the screen. Notice how the Slow In setting of 5 frames smoothed the landing of the pie. If you continue with the other two pieces to construct the full pie chart, you'll see that this Slow In element is very important to the look of the animation. NOTE You can also accomplish these types of assembly moves with the Start and End buttons as well, without having to use Come To. If you get the point of this exercise and don't want to complete the flying pie chart, you can continue on. Otherwise, (or if you want to continue for fun) there are two more pieces of pie chart to load. Load each one and stamp it in place (with the black edges of the slices overlapping) and set any move you want that will send the slice flying onto the screen. This is a great opportunity to experiment with the Move requester settings; no matter what numbers you enter, the pie will come to the proper end point on frame 20. Record The Record options let you specify the direction in which Deluxe Paint paints the frames of your move. Forward is the default and prints the frames by flipping forward. In Place causes Deluxe Paint to print all of the move on the current frame. Backward paints the frames by flipping backward - this option is useful with Trails. Trails and Fill are best explained by vivid example - you'll find two exam ples of each in the next chapter. Load Displays the Load Move requester. From here you can load Move settings that you entered and saved with the Save Move requester. When you load a move, you are loading only the settings for the Move requester. You still need to startup your brush in the correct position and on the correct frame to duplicate the move you had in mind. If you aren't absolutely sure of the setting you want to load, try using the feature this way: stamp your brush in the centre of the screen: load the move settings you think you want; click Preview to see the move as it would look if it started from the middle of the screen. This will give you a good idea of what the move looks like when it is actually drawn, and it will also help you determine where your brush should be stamped to produce the best move for these settings. The requester works just like the Load Picture requester. Save Displays the Save Move requester. Deluxe Paint lets you save the settings (though not the images) of any move you set up in the Move requester. You can load a saved settings and use them as a kind of template to automatical ly describe the movement of another object. The requester works just like the Save Picture requester. Animated Brushes So far we've shown you how to create an animation by painting on a series of frames. Deluxe Paint also lets you select an area of animation as a brush and paint with it. The result is that the brush changes while you paint, and, depending on whether or not the frame changes, you create either anima tion or interesting effects. In Guided Tour (2), we showed you how to load and use one of the AnimBrushes included on the Examples disk. In this section, we'll show you how to create a simple AnimBrush of your own and paint with it. Creating an AnimBrush To begin, let's create a simple animation that we can easily pick up as a brush. Choose Palette>Default Palette from the Colour menu. Clear all of your animation frames. Print a circle about the size of a quarter and filled with a gradient. Pick your sphere up as a brush using the right mouse button to pick it up off the screen. Paint your brush down and rotate it 360 degrees over twenty frames. To do this: Display the Move requester. Click Zero to set all of the options to their defaults. Set the Z Angle to 360 and select Brush angle. Select Cyclic and make sure the Count is 20. Make sure Slow In and Slow Out are set to 0. Click Draw. Your brush will rotate in place to create an animation that looks a little like a spinning planet. Picking Up an Animbrush When Deluxe Paint is finished painting the animation, step to frame 1 and choose AnimBrush>Pick Up from the Anim menu. A large cross hair like the one you use to pick up standard brushes appears, bur it is special in that it picks up from a series of frames. Pick up the sphere animation as a brush as you normally would using the left mouse button. In the Pick up AnimBrush requester that appears, 20 should appear in the Number of Cels edit box. If it does, click OK. After you click OK, you will see each of the frames flip as the area is picked up. When it's done, you have your AnimBrush. Another way to pick up an AnimBrush is to select the Brush Selector and hold down the Alt key as you pick up an area of your animation. Painting with y adding these features to the face may not be as easy as it seems, especially if the face is moving. This tutorial will show you how to add the smile and the eyes to the face to the in-between frames fairly easily using the LightTable. Choose LightTable>Settings... from the Effect menu. The LightTable Settings requester appears. Click on the first two boxes on the far left of the requester. This will activate layer #1 and layer #2. You will notice a check mark appear next to ll see a ball roll from left to right across the screen. AnimBrush Settings When you begin to combine AnimBrushes into large animations, you'll find that occasionally you want to change the rate at which an AnimBrush trans forms. You might even want to change the direction in which an AnimBrush plays. For example, you might want the gradient ball you creat ed above to turn in the opposite direction. You can do this with the AnimBrush Settings requester. Choose AnimBrush>Settings from the Anim menu. Direction Click the (backward) direction button and click OK. Now your gradient circle will rotate in the opposite direction when you paint with it. The other direction setting is called Ping Pong. This setting causes the brush to alternate between forward and backward play. Duration The Duration box in the AnimBrush Settings requester let's you specify how many stamps of the brush the AnimBrush uses to complete its cycle. If the Duration number is larger than the number of cels, the brush seems to move more slowly. If the Duration number is smaller than the number of cels, the brush seems to move more quickly. Let's try painting normally with a brush and then paint with the Duration set higher. Choose AnimBrush>Load from the Anim menu. Load the file named Sweep from the AnimBrush directory of your Examples disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Display the AnimBrush Settings requester and set the Direction to play forward. (Notice that this animated brush has 1O cels). Click OK. Position the karate figure on the left side of the screen. Hold down the Alt key and click the mouse button repeatedly without moving the mouse to paint one cel of the animbrush on each of the 20 frames of your animation. You now have an animation of a karate character performing a sweep kick twice. You'll notice that the sweep kick is fairly rapid. Next we'll paint the same animbrush with a longer duration to slow down the motion of the character. Choose AnimBrush>Settings from the Anim menu. Set the Duration box to 2O. Set the Current box to 1 to put the brush at its first cel. Click OK. Now position the karate figure on the right side of the screen. Hold down the Alt key and paint one cel of the AnimBrush on each of the 2O frames. When you've finished painting your AnimBrush on the 2O frames, press the 4 key at the top of the keyboard to play the animation. Compare the speed of the two characters. If you step through the frames of your animation one at a time, you'll see that the man on the right takes two frames before changing position, while the man on the left moves on every frame. You can also use Duration to speed up an animbrush by setting the Durarion number lower than the number of cels in the brush. In that case, cels of the brush would be skipped as you painted with the brush. Note: If you increase the duration of an AnimBrush, it is best to set a durarion that is a multiple of the number of cels in your brush. For example, an animbrush that has 10 frames will generally look best if you set the duration to 10, 20, 30, etc. Metamorphous AnimBrushes Another way to create AnimBrushes is to transform the image and shape of one custom brush into those of a second custom brush. This special feature, called metamorphosis, can create some stunning effects. We'll show you a couple of very simple examples just to give you the idea. The first example metaomorphoses between very different brushes. The second example meta morphoses between two transformed versions of the same brush. In both examples, you'll use the Spare options in the Brush menu to work with two custom brushes at the same time. The Chicken and the Egg. In this example, you'll load two different custom brushes (a chicken egg) and create an AnimBrush that metamorphoses between the two. Clear all frames of your animation. If the Animation Control Panel is NOT on your screen, press Alt A to display it. Choose Load from the Brush menu, and load the file named egg brush from the Brush drawer of the Media disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Choose Spare>Brush>Spare from the Brush menu. The Brush>Spare option copies your custom brush to the spare custom brush buffer. Now that you have the first brush in the spare buffer, you can load a second brush without losing the first one. Choose Load from the Brush menu, and load the file named "chicken" from the Brush drawer on Media. Now you have two custom brushes what you can swap back and forth between by choosing Spare>Brush<->Spare from the Brush menu. Try it if you like. Make sure that the chicken is your current brush before you proceed. Now choose Spare>Morph>Spare from the Brush menu (The Make AnimBrush requester appears). Enter 11 in the edit box as the number of cels in your new brush, and click OK. It will take a little while for Deluxe Paint to morph your two custom brushes into one AnimBrush. Go to AnimBrush settings on the Ping Pong direction button and click OK. The Ping Pong option automatically plays your AnimBrush to the end and back again repeatedly without doubling the first or last cel of the brush This means that the brush is effectively twice as long minus 2 cels. (In this case, we had you create an 11 cel brush so that the Ping Pong version would play over exactly 20 frames). You'll find the Ping Pong option very useful for converting linear brushes into cyclical ones without having to create the extra frames. Hold down the Alt key, and click the brush repeatedly, to paint the brush over 20 frames. Press 4 to play the anim. You'll see an egg meramorphose into a chicken and back into an egg over and over until you press the space bar to stop the animation. The LightTable The LightTable lets you view a few frames of animation overlaid on each other like clear sheets of cellophane to help you position brushes or paint the in between frames of a character animation. The LightTable also allows you to set multiple levels of dim so that you can view any frames in your animation behind (or after) your current frame. This enables you to more easily see the frame you are working on. (This dimming effect is available in all modes except HAM) Traditional animators work by painting the key positions or poses of a char acter and then paint the "in-between" frames to create the smooth transition between poses. The LightTable is ideal for creating animation with this tra ditional approach. In the next few pages, we'll introduce the basics of using the LightTable. A new LightTable feature is the LightTable Settings requester (Effect>LightTable>Settings...) You can use this requester to control all four LightTable layers - you can turn each layer on or off, set the anima- tion frame associated with the layer, and set 'dim' levels for each layer. The Dim level for each layer can be set with a slider from -255 (Maximum brightness; even lighter than the original frame) to 255 (completely dimmed out). Simple Tweening We'll start out with a simple example of painting some in between frames of an animation. Choose Load from the Anim pull down menu and load the animation LightTable.anim When you load this animation you will notice that this is a 5 frame animi- tion showing a face moving left to right. You will also notice that the smile and the eyes are missing from frame 2 and frame 4. Normally adding these features to the face may not be as easy as it seems, especially if the face is moving. This tutorial will show you how to add the smile and the eyes to the face to the in-between frames fairly easily using the LightTable. Choose LightTable>Settings... from the Effect menu. The LightTable Settings requester appears. Click on the first two boxes on the far left of the requester. This will activate layer #1 and layer #2. You will notice a check mark appear next to box #1 and #2. Now we need to tell it which frame you want it to affect and how much dim you want to add to this layer. On Layer #1 change the frame box to I and move the slider on the right until it is at -200. This means that layer 1 shows 1 frame ahead of the frame you are currently on and it will appear somewhat transparent because of the dim setting that you adjusted. Moving the slider to the left adds more white to the image and moving it to the right will add more black. NOTE The LightTable settings will have optimum perfomance if your background is either black or white. Once you are finished using the LightTable you can colour in your image and change the background to whatever coloyr you desire. On Layer #2 change the frame box to -1 and move the slider on the right until it is at -175. This means layer 2 will show 1 frame behind the frame you are currently on. Click OK to leave this requester. Press the 3 key on your keyboard (not the numeric keypad), to bring up the GO TO FRAME requester. Enter 2 in this requester and click OK. Hold Down the Alt key on your keyboard and press A at the same time. This will bring up the anim control panel. You will notice that button #1 and button #2 to the right of the light bulb button is activated. This is because we selected these two layers in the light table settings requester. Press the light bulb button on this panel. Notice that their is a dimmed version of frame 1 and frame 3 superimposed on the current frame. This gives the illusion of drawing on very thin paper. Now that the LightTable is activated draw the eyes and the mouth on the face on frame 2. You may need to toggle the LightTable on and off with the L key on your keyboard. Go to frame 4 and draw the in-between frame here as well. Pres play on the Anim control panel, turn on some music, and watch the face move his head to the beat. If you like your animation, save it before moving on to the next sec tion. For more information, check our Chapter 8: Reference Evolution of an Animation In this section we'll look at how a traditional animation evolves in Deluxe Paint V. The Background Turn off the LightTable Delete all of your animation frames. Choose Load from the Picture menu and load the picture DoggieBackground.LoRes from the Picture drawer on your Examples disk. When the message appears asking whether or not you want to change format to that of the file, click Yes. The picture you see is a simple background image of a lawn and tree. This image is the background for the DoggieOutline animation. Before anima tors begin to draw an animation, they create a background image against which the animated characters will move. The background image can be as complex as a city scene or as simple as a straight line to indicate the ground level for the characters to walk on. Whatever its level of complexity the background helps keep all of the pieces working in harmony. In the next brief section, we'll load a wire frame animation over the back- ground image. The Outline Now we'll take a look at the first step of creating an animation over a background. Choose Spare>Swap from the picture menu to put the background picture on the spare page. Load the anim DoggieOutline from the Anim drawer on your Examples disk. When the message appears to ask if you want to change the number of colours to that of the file, click No. Note! You just performed an important operation; you loaded an 8 colour wire frame animation into 16 colour mode. Deluxe Paint lets you load animations into screen formats that use more colours and thus makes it possible for you to create the initial animation outline in just a few colours and load it into a format with more colours later on when you want to paint the frames. DoggieOutline is a few frames of a simple wireframe animation that was created by an animator who uses the traditional method of first drawing the outline version of the animation and then filling it with solid colours or pat- terns to create a finished piece. Traditional animators call the outline version of an animation the "pencil test". Turn on the LightTable to view the animation frames overlaid on one another. Click the 4 button in the Anim Control Panel to view the Spare page behind the animation. See how useful it is to view the background image through your animation frames? With the background visible, the animator can easily align the ani- mated characters without having to worry about accidentally ruining the background image. Even if you aren't working on an animation, you might find it useful to view a background image while you paint. If you turn off the Dim option (from the LightTable submenu of the Effects menu) you can view the background in its original colours and thus treat your anima tion frame as a transparent page. Choose different combinations of settings (1, 2, 3, and 4) in the LightTable area of the Anim Control Panel. Move the Frame Slider back and forth to view the different animation frames and background combined with the various settings. Merging in the Background One of the powerful features of the LightTable is its ability to let you merge your viewed frames. We'll try it right now by merging the background image into the image on one of the frames Make sure LightTable is on, but turn off all of the LightTable options other than 4 (for Spare). You should see your current frame against the background on the Spare page with no other frames visible. Choose LightTable>Merge from the Effects menu. In a moment, your background is merged with your wireframe animation. Notice that the LightTable is automatically turned off after a merge opera tion. This is done so you will see the frame in its actual state and not be confused by LightTable effects. One caution is in order: you can't Undo a merge, so you should be very careful that the image as you see it in the LightTable is correct before you merge it. Another way to merge the background image with the frames is to use the Spare>Merge in Back option in the Picture menu. This option lets you merge to the current frame, to a range of frames, or to all frames in a single operation. This is generally the last step an animator takes in the creation of a finished traditional piece. The Painted Animation Before we leave this section, we'd like you to load in a painted animation that was created using the techniques described in this chapter. TIP If you are going to be saving your animations to video tape and you don't have a lot of RAM in your Amiga, it might be best not to merge a back ground into your animation. Instead, you can create a painted background and use a GenLock device to combine the video signal of the Amiga with the signal of a camera focused on the painted background as you record the two to a videotape. Load the walk.anim from the Gallery drawer of the Extras disk. This High Res 16 colour animation was created by an animator at Elecrtonic Arts using Deluxe Paint and traditional animation techniques. Brush Axes vs Screen Axes Now that we've covered pretty much everything else, it's time to cover the sticky issue of brush vs screen axes. We've tried to make the example very clear but if you feel you need further help, review Chapter Five: Working with Perspective. We should also mention that you will not need to change the default settings for these options very Move requester to stamp your brush saves you from having to carefully position the brush on each frame. You can also accomplish this by positioning the brush once and then using the keyboard equivalent Amiga Left Alt to click the left mouse button. (We recommend that you press the Amiga key first and then press the Alt key quickly once for a single stamp, because pressing the keys in the opposite order will start animpainting over many frames). Since you didn't use all 40 of your fraen Format from the Picture menu and change your format to Lo-Res 320 x 200, Screen size page, and 32 colours palette. Choose Page Size from the Picture menu and change page size to Screen 320 x 200. Click OK. Choose Frames>Set # from the Anim menu and set the number of frames to 20. Choose Load from the Brush menu and load the brush named DPaintTitle brush from the Brush drawer on your Media disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. You should now have a clear page and the DPaintTitle brush ready to work with. Choose Perspective>Do from the Effect menu to enter Perspective mode. Move the brush down near the bottom of the screen and Press Shift- Keypad 7 to flop the brush over on its back. Click to paint down the brush. To flop the brush over on its back you rotated it -90 degrees on the X axis (see the Title Bar) and shifted the brush axes so that they no longer correspond to the screen axes. Figure 6.8 illustrates the change in the brush axes. Now if you use the Move requester to move the brush along the Y axis, you will get different results depending on whether or not you have selected the Brush button. Display the Move requester, and click Load. When the Load Move requester appears, load the file called Animbasics1.Mov from the Move drawer of Examples. Click Preview from the Move requester. The wire frame model of your brush moves upwards just as you would expect when moving along the screen axis. Click the Brush button beside the Distance edit boxes. A check mark appears in the box. Now click Preview and watch the direction the brush moves. This time the brush moved into the distance along the Y axis of the brush. As Figure 6.15 above shows, the brush's Y axis is the same as the screen's Z axis when you rotate backwards 90 degrees on X as we did. Rotation on the Brush's Axis You may have already guessed what will happen when we rotate the brush on its own axes rather than on the screen axes, but this is sometimes difficult to visualise, so we'll give an example. Click Cancel to close the Move requester. Right-click CLR and select All Frames in the requester to clear all frames. Choose Perspective>Reset from the Effect menu to reset all of the Perspective settings. At this point you once again have your brush in the original orientation and are in Perspective mode. Now we'll rotate the brush on the Z axis, so that the X and Y axes of the brush no longer match the X and Y axes of the screen. Hold down 2 on the keypad until the brush has rotated 45 degrees on the Z axis. You'll see the degrees of rotation in the right side of the Title Bar. Paint down the brush in the middle of the screen. Press M to display the Move requester. Click Zero in the requester. Click Load. When the Load Move requester appears, load the file called Animbasics2.Mov from the Move drawer of the Media disk. Make sure the Brush button beside the Angle edit boxes don't have a tick on it. Click Preview. With the settings above, you'll see the brush tumble toward the screen on the X axis. Remember that the brush is rotating on the Screen's X axis. Now let's look at a rotation on the brush's X axis. In the Move requester click the Brush button beside the Angle edit boxes; click Preview. This time the brush spins around its own X axis instead of tumbling toward the screen. The idea is the same for all rotations, though it isn't always easy to predict what a complex set of rotations will look like. You'll probably find that most of your moves can be accomplished with rotation around only. TIP If this last exercise was less informative than you had hoped, you should probably review the chapter on Perspective. There you will find more examples that might help you better understand the difference between screen and brush angles. Now that you've seen some of Deluxe Paint's animation features, you might like to play around a little. Load the animations from the Examples disk and play them. There are several AnimBrushes on the disk that you can combine with the Ocean Background.picture to form an aquarium scene. When you feel you're ready to see some more of Deluxe Paint's animation features, move onto the next chapter. It shows you how to create some interesting animation effects by combining different features of the program. CHAPTER 7 - ANIMATION EFFECTS ----------------------------- This chapter introduces several interesting animation effects and a host of animation tips. We strongly recommend that you work through this chapter and complete the Amazing Bouncing Ball section, which serves as a good test of your knowledge of Deluxe Paint. Effects In the following sections you'll create some interesting animation effects. Many of these effects are not obvious, so it is worth your time to follow closely and work along. NOTE: As you begin each section that uses the Move requester, reset the requester to its default settings. Our instructions will tell you only which settings you need to change out of the defaults when you first open the requester. Figure 7.1 shows the Move requester in its default settings; use this as a guide if you need to check your own settings. Before You Begin Make sure you are in Lo Res mode with 32 colours. Set your number of frames to 40. Make sure you are using the Compressed memory model. Make sure FastFB is selected in the Prefs menu. Quick Effects These effects are good examples of how multiple features of Deluxe Paint combine to make simple animation easy to create. Receding or Approaching Shapes This technique creates the effect of a shape moving off into the distance Notice that this involves using a keyboard command while you paint with the mouse button down. Right click the largest round brush and stretch the brush to be about the size of a nickel. Select the Dotted Freehand tool. Position the brush near the upper left corner of the screen. Hold down the Alt key and begin animpainting in a curve downward toward the lower right area of the screen. As you paint, release the Alt key and press the - (minus) key repeatedly to shrink the brush as it moves. When you play back the animation, the gradual shrinking of the brush makes it look as though it is receding into the distance. Play the animation backwards, or create a new one using the = (equals or plus) key to enlarge the brush, and the brush will appear to approach from the distance. This example used a built-in brush, but you can do the same thing with a custom brush. Brush Erosion The Edge>Trim command in the Brush menu makes it easy to have an object dissolve into nothing. You stamp the brush, trim some away, step to the next frame, and stamp again. The real trick is to use the keyboard to do all of your frame changes, trimming, and brush stamps. Select black as your background colour and clear all of your frames. Load the DPaintTitle brush from your Media disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Stamp the brush in the middle of frame 1. Display the Move requester. Click Zero to set all of the Distance and Angle edit fields to 0. Set the Count to 1. Make sure that all of the other options are set to their defaults. Click Draw. Press Shift 0 to trim the brush. Press Shift-m to display the Move requester and click Draw. Repeat this step until the brush has com pletely disappeared, (It will take about 11 frames). Using the Move requester to stamp your brush saves you from having to carefully position the brush on each frame. You can also accomplish this by positioning the brush once and then using the keyboard equivalent Amiga Left Alt to click the left mouse button. (We recommend that you press the Amiga key first and then press the Alt key quickly once for a single stamp, because pressing the keys in the opposite order will start animpainting over many frames). Since you didn't use all 40 of your frames, we'll use the Control>Set Range option in the Anim menu to play just the frames you painted. Choose Control>Set Range in the Set Play Range requester, set the From field to 1 and the To field to 12. Click Range. Click OK. Now press 4 to play your animation and you'll see your brush dissolve repeatedly until you press space bar or click to stop the animation (If the animation is moving too quickly press the left arrow key to slow it down). Before you leave this example, choose Control>Set Range again and click the All Frames button. Animated Fades This example shows you how to use the Fade feature in Deluxe Paint V's Move requester. We will create a simple 40 Frame animation of a title fading out to the background. Load the DPaintTitle brush from the Brush drawer on your Media disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Select the dark grey from your palette as your background colour. Clear all frames of you animation and go to frame 1 (Shift-1) Press M (Shift m) to display the Move requester. Click Zero to clear out the distance and angle fields. Set the count to 40 if not already so Click Start and then click Adjust and place the Brush in the centre of your screen. Press Return or Enter to exit Adjust mode. Make sure the Fade slider is it 0. Click End and then change the Fade slider to 255 (all the way to the right). For added effect, type 360 in the Z angle edit field with Brush checked on. Click Draw and when the move requester is done with your anima tion, press 6 to watch it fade out and back in as it ping pongs. Keep your animation in memory you may want to use it for the next animi- tion effect tip. The larger your palette size and the more like colours you have between the brush and your background, the better your fade turns out. Often an animator wants to pause on a certain frame for a second to several seconds to give an animation that certain effect or feel. In the past, the only way you could do that in Deluxe Paint was to duplicate the frame you wanted to pause on several times. This works fine, but it wastes precious memory you could be using for other things. Deluxe Paint V now allows you to perform Anim Pauses on a single frame or multiple frames without adding the memory overhead. Here's how you can use it: Using the animation you created in the last effects tutorial we will modify the animation so that the first frame pauses for 3 seconds continues at full speed, then pauses in the last frame for 3 seconds as well. Here's how to do it: Go to frame one (Shift-1). Select Frames>Set Frame Rate from the Anim menu. Click on the Vary by Frame button (this tells Deluxe Paint you are about to create a variable frame rate animation). Click in the Jiffies edit field and type in 180 (this is assuming you're in NTSC 1/60 frame rate). Hence to get a 3 second pause we have multi plied 60 X 3 = 180. In PAL modes you would type in 150 or 50 X 3. As a rule of thumb just remember this: Scan Rate or Frame Rate multi- plied by the number of seconds you would like to pause is equal to the number of Jiffies you must enter in the edit field. Make sure that Current Frame is selected in the bottom portion of the requester. Click OK. Play the animation (press 4), you'll notice that the first frame pauses for approximately 3 seconds. Let's put a pause at the end. Go to the last frame (Shift-2). Select Frames>Set Frame Rate from the Anim menu again. Click in the Jiffies edit field and type in the same number you did for frame 1 (180 for NTSC, 150 for PAL). Again, make sure Current Frame is selected and click OK. Play the animation forward (press 4) or ping pong it (press 6) and you'll see that you've easily modified an existing animation to pause at the beginning and end very easily. You may never have to duplicate a frame for speed effect ever again. Animations you have modified using vary by frame will save out with that information, so that when you play them back in the Deluxe Player or reload them into Deluxe Paint you don't have to set up the pauses again. Expanding Circles This example shows you how to create the effect of a circle expanding out ward like a "sonar blip". You use two Deluxe Paint features to help you align the circles and make them grow uniformly: Grid and the 2 key (the Next Frame keyboard equivalent). Clear all frames of your animation and go to frame 1. Turn on the Grid with X and Y spacing of 8. Select the second largest round built in brush and paint a dot in the centre of the screen. Choose the Unfilled Circle tool. Start from the dot in the centre of the screen and drag out a circle that is just one grid point wider than the dot, but don't release the mouse button. Press the 2 key to move to the next frame. Now release the mouse button. At this point you have a dot on frame 1 and a small circle on frame 2. Continue to follow the last step above to paint larger and larger circles on successive frames until your circle reaches the sides of the screen. When you play your animation, you'll see one circle expanding outward. If you're adventurous, try picking up your entire animation as an AnimBrush and animpainting it onto your existing animation by sitting it on frame 5 This will give you an animation of two circles expanding outward. Trails This example demonstrates the use of Trails. You'll find this option in the Move requester makes it easy to create impressive title effects. Clear all frames. Load the brush DpaintTitle from the Media disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Press Shift-2 to go to the LAST frame. You should be on frame 40. Stamp the brush at the bottom of the screen. Display the Move requester. Click Zero. Set the Z Distance to -1500. Select the Come To option for your Move Direction, (Make sure the Fade slider is reset to 0) The Come To option tells Deluxe Paint that the position of the brush is where you want the animation to end - you want the animation to " come to" the brush position and frame. Click Preview. There is a slight delay, and then the preview plays, starting at the distant position [Z=1500] and coming closer. Instead of clicking Draw, click Trails, and let it record. By clicking Trails, you tell Deluxe Paint to carry the cumulative effect of each frame forward as it draws. The result is that the brush leaves a trail as it moves through three dimensional space in your animation. Press 5 on the main keyboard for a singly play of the animation. For added effect, add a Fade to the start or end of the animation. The Slinky The Slinky is a modified version of the standard Trails title. You've probably seen this effect on many television sports shows. A special feature of this effect is that it uses the Stencil in combination with the Move requester This combination can be very powerful when used properly. When a stencil is used with the Move requester, Deluxe Paint remakes the stencil for each frame as it renders the move. Clear all frames. Load the DPaintTitle brush if you don't already have it. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette. Step to the middle frame of your total. For example, if you have 40 frames as we suggested, move to frame 20 by typing 3 to access the Go To Frame requester. Stamp the brush down near the centre of the screen. Display the Move requester. Click Zero. Make sure that both Brush buttons are unchecked. Also, be sure Fade is set to 0 at Start and End. Set the Z Distance to -1500, and set the Z angle to 0. Set the Count to 20. Select the Come To option. Click Trails. As in the Trails effect above, Deluxe Paint paints your title with the cumula tive image carried forward to each successive frame. Step to frame 40 (use Shift-2 to go to the last frame quickly). Now you need to create a stencil so you can "paint behind". Choose Stencil>Make from the Effect menu. In the Make stencil requester, click the background colour (black), click Invert, and click Make to lock all colours but the background. Display the Move requester. Leave all of the other settings the same, but select the backwards Record Direction («). Click Trails. Because you reversed the Record direction, Deluxe Paint begins this move by by painting on frame 40. It then steps one frame backwards and paints the the cumulative effect of frame 40 and the new brush position on frame 39. This 39. This is where the Stencil comes into play. Because the colours in the title the title are stenciled, the second brush stamp appears to be painted "behind" the single image that was stamped on frame 40. Though, in fact, it was painted over the single image. The resulting animation should have your brush moving from the distance leaving Trails, until it gets to the nearest position, at which point the Trails start erasing from the back forward. Before you move on to the next effect, choose Stencil>Free from the Effect menu. Curving Titles This example shows you how to create the effect of a title moving across the screen on a curved path using the curve tool instead of the Move requester. Clear all frames. Load the DPaintTitle.brush from your Media disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Go to the last frame (frame 40) and stamp the brush near the bottom of the screen. Click Undo. TIP Clicking UNDO immediately after stamping the brush helps ensure that your results are what you expect. This is particularly important if you are using a Brush Mode in your move, because Deluxe Paint paints on the screen you stamped on when it paints the move, and stamping twice on the same screen will give a different result from a single stamp. Of course, with Deluxe Paint V you can also use the Start and End Adjust buttons to place your starting or ending positions without stamping down the brush at all. Display the Move requester and click Zero. Be sure Record is set to forward (») and set the Count to 40. Set the Z distance to -1200. Select the Come To option. Click Draw. Deluxe Paint paints the brush moving toward the screen from the distance. Pick up the animated title as an AnimBrush. (Be sure you are on frame 1 when you pick up the brush and that you enclose the entire area of the move - the bottom half of the screen in this case). Press Alt-x to place the brush handle in the lower right corner of the brush so you will be able to click it off-screen. Clear all frames. Right click the Curve tool to display the Spacing requester. Click the N Total button and set the total to 40. Click OK. The Spacing requester lets you tell Deluxe Paint exactly how many brush stamps you want to use to paint your curves, lines, and unfilled shapes. By setting the Spacing to N Total of 40, you'll get 40 stamps of the brush. Since you have 40 frames, when you use the brush to animpaint, you'll get one stamp of the brush on each frame Position the brush at the left side of the screen and midway between the top and bottom. Hold down the Alt key and the left mouse button and drag down to the lower right corner of the screen. (You'll see your title drawn along the path of your curve). Release the mouse button and define the shape of the curve while still holding down the Alt key. When the curve is a shape you like, left-click to begin animpainting. When Deluxe Paint is finished painting your curve, press 5 to play the ani mation once. You'll see the brush move into view and curve its way down to the lower right corner of the screen. Tumbling 3D Objects Like the Curving Title effect above, this effect also uses the curve tool to move an AnimBrush along a curved path. However, in this effect, you use an object that looks three dimensional, and you tumble it at the same time you move it towards the screen. Clear all frames. Load the brush named GradientCube from the Brush drawer on your Art disk. Choose Palette>Use Brush Palette from the Colour menu. Go to the last animation frame (frame 40). Stamp the brush in the centre of the screen. Click Undo. Display the Move requester. Set the Z Distance to -1200 and the Z Angle to 720 (with Brush check). Select the Come To option. Click Draw. Deluxe Paint paints your cube rotating 720 and moving toward you from the distance. Now you need to pick up this tumbling object as a brush. You must pick up the entire animated area, beginning at frame 1 where you see only a tiny object. Here's how: Click the Brush Selector. Go to frame 40, where the object is largest. From this frame you can easily see how large an area you need to select to enclose the entire animated area of the gradient cube. Hold down the Alt key and enclose the object with your crosshair, but don't release the mouse button. (You can release the Alt key). Press 2 to step forward to frame 1. Release the mouse button. Now you have your AnimBrush of the object tumbling and moving toward you. In the next step, you use the curve tool and Spacing to give it a trajec tory across the screen. Clear all frames. Right click on the Curve tool. Set the Spacing requester to N Total 40. Place the brush handle in the lower right corner of the brush so you will be able to click it off-screen. Press Shift 7 to go to the first cel of the AnimBrush. Position the brush at the left side of the screen and midway between the top and bottom. Hold down the Alt key and the left mouse button and drag down to the lower right corner of the screen. Release the mouse button and define the third point of the curve while still holding down the Alt key. When the curve is a shape you like, click to begin animpainting. Notice that even though the cube has only two true dimensions, the combi nation of the three-sided view and the tumble make it appear as though the brush is three dimensional. Planetary Orbits - Brush Handles. This example shows you how to create an animation that simulates the orbit of a planet. This demonstrates the importance of brush handles - when you rotate a brush, the rotation always takes place around the brush handle. Paint a circle about the size of a quarter and filled with a gradient. Pick the circle up as a brush. Clear all frames. Stamp a copy of the brush in the middle of the screen. Display the Move requester and click Draw to draw 40 frames of your brush. If you are holding the brush by its corner, first choose Handle>Rotate (Alt-x) from the Brush menu until the brush is centred. Now choose Handle>Place from the Brush menu. Your brush now has a cross-hair running through the centre of it. Position the brush about an inch and a half above the circle you paint ed in the middle of the screen. Hold down the left mouse button, drag straight down to the centre of the ball you painted, and release the mouse button Now your brush is offset from the cursor by about two inches. We'll use this brush to create an orbiting planet. Point at the centre of the stamped circle with the cursor and click. (This stamps your circle brush above the circle in the middle of the screen). Display the Move requester. Set the Z Angle to 360. Click Draw. Play the animation back and you'll see that your planet orbits around the central circle! Using the brush handle effectively becomes a little more complicated when you rotate over more than one axis, but you might want to spend a little time trying different settings to see the effects you can create. eND oF pART tWO