ANIMATION STATION Typed in by THE SOUTHERN STAR for MAAD. Edited by PARASITE. TABLE OF CONTENTS Section One: Introduction............................................ 1 What is Animation?........................................... 1 Computer Animation vs. "Cell" Animation...................... 1 Creation............................................. 2 Editing.............................................. 2 Timing............................................... 2 Sources.............................................. 3 Section Two: Getting Started......................................... 4 System Requirements and Recommendations...................... 4 Hard Disk Installation....................................... 5 From Workbench....................................... 5 From CLI............................................. 6 Starting Animation Station................................... 6 Running the Program.......................................... 7 From Workbench....................................... 7 From CLI............................................. 7 Section Three: Software Reference.................................... 9 The Main Editing Screen...................................... 9 The PathMaster File Selector................................ 10 Main Editing Screen Icons................................... 16 Play................................................ 16 Fast Play........................................... 16 Insert Frames....................................... 17 Select All/None..................................... 17 Mirror.............................................. 17 Gray Scale.......................................... 18 Append at End....................................... 18 Color Palette....................................... 18 The Palette Requester....................... 19 Special Effects..................................... 24 The Special Effects Requester............... 24 Brush Move.......................................... 27 The Brush Movement Requester................ 27 Timing.............................................. 30 The Frame Timing Requester.................. 30 Grab Brush.......................................... 33 Crop................................................ 34 Fast Mode/Storyboard Mode Toggle.................... 34 SAVE ILBM........................................... 35 LOAD ILBM........................................... 35 SAVE ANIM........................................... 37 LOAD ANIM........................................... 38 MOVE................................................ 39 COPY................................................ 39 VIEW................................................ 40 MERGE............................................... 40 UNDO................................................ 42 Disk Info........................................... 42 The Disk Info Requester..................... 42 Clear Frame......................................... 43 Delete.............................................. 43 Section Four: Animation Station Tutorials........................... 44 Tutorial One: Basic Editor Functions........................ 44 Tutorial Two: Creating Animations From Individual Pictures.. 51 Tutorial Three: Advanced Editor Features.................... 56 Tutorial Four: Working With a HAM Animation................. 60 Section Five: Tips and Hints........................................ 62 Appendix A - Outline of Animation Station Icons..................... 65 Appendix B - Animation Station Custom Configuration................. 69 Appendix C - File Formats........................................... 72 The ANIM Format............................................. 72 The "Audio" File Format..................................... 73 Appendix D - Glossary of Terms...................................... 75 Appendix E - Utilities.............................................. 78 Index............................................................... 80 SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION Welcome to Animation Station. Animation Station provides an easy to use "point and click" method to edit "ANIM" format animation files. Animation Station allows you to "Cut and Paste" frames, add special effects, or even combine multiple animations to be displayed at the same time. Many tools and functions have been provided to allow you to work with animation and picture files from a variety of sources and formats. In addition to editing existing animation files, Animation Station allows you to create new animations from individual picture files. Animation Station creates a "Storyboard" for each animation file being edited. For easy identification, a miniature representation of each frame of the animation is displayed as part of the "Storyboard". By manipulating these miniatures on the screen, you are instructing Animation Station to perform similar manipulations to the animation file. WHAT IS ANIMATION? The term "ANIMATION" brings to mind pictures of Disney classics, with characters made of ink, running around on a screen, making us laugh. Well, computer animation is not much different from the classics. The major difference is that these characters or images are moving on the computer's screen instead of a movie screen. Just like cartoon animation, each image that your eyes see, must first be drawn, pieced together, and shown in rapid succession. This rapid change creates the illusion of motion. If done properly, the characters on the screen gain a sense of life and realism. These images are then said to be animated. COMPUTER ANIMATION VS. "CELL" ANIMATION No matter how the images were created, whether by hand or completely computer generated, these images must somehow be pieced together. This is where computer animation gains advantage over "cell" animation normally used in animation studios. This advantage allows for professional looking animations to be created on a personal computer such as the Amiga. 1 CREATION: A "cell" animation is pieced together by transferring the image from a paper to a "cell" or cellophane. It is then colored, placed over a background and photographed. After several hundred "cells" have been photographed, the film is developed and displayed on a projector as a movie. Animation Station performs a similar function, by reading several picture files and creating a single animation file. The animation file can be displayed on the computer screen just as the movie is displayed on a projector. EDITING: Once the images have been joined together, they may be edited to add to the effect of the illusion. This editing can entail rearranging the order in which the images, or frames are presented, or modification of one or more frames. Adding a sound track adds a realism that is often lacking in computer animation. Editing a movie can be very tedious and time consuming. Sections may be physically cut out and pasted elsewhere in the movie sequence. But if a single frame of the movie needs to be altered, it is very difficult to do so. Not so with computer animation. Just as with "cell" animation, it is possible to "cut and paste" single or multiple frames of the animation. If a single frame needs to be modified however, the modified image may be simply substituted for the original. TIMING: Another advantage of computer animation is timing. With timing you can make a particular picture remain on the screen for as long as you like. This can drastically reduce the number of frames required for an animation. With a "cell" animation on the other hand, the same frame would have to be photographed several times to create the same effect. 2 SOURCES: Usually the "cell" animator either draws each picture used in the animation, or an object in real life is photographed as in the popular "clay" animations. The computer animator has several sources for the pictures he may use in his animation. These include pictures from paint programs, ray-traced pictures, digitized pictures, pictures from 3-D modelers, etc. Any picture file that is in the correct format may be used. 3 SECTION TWO: GETTING STARTED Your Animation Station package should include the following: 1. Program Disk 2. Tutorial Disk 3. This Manual 4. Registration/Warranty Card If one or more of these items is missing, contact your dealer, or Progressive Peripherals & Software, Inc. 464 Kalamath Street, Denver, Colorado 80204 Ph. (303) 825-4144 FAX (303) 893-6938 System Requirements and Recommendations: Amiga Computer with at least One Megabyte memory. (More Memory is recommended for larger animations). Animation Station requires at least 1 Megabyte of memory for execution. This requirement is imposed simply because animations require large amounts of RAM for data storage. One Megabyte if the MINIMUM memory configuration. More memory is highly recommended. As a simple rule, you should have at least 375K of contiguous CHIP RAM available prior to running Animation Station. You should also have at least 200K more contiguous FAST RAM than the size of the Animation. For example, if the Animation is 500,000 bytes in length, you should have 700,000 bytes of contiguous FAST RAM available. This means that for a 500K animation, you MUST have at least 1.5 Megabytes total memory, approximately 1.15 Megabytes free memory prior to the execution of Animation Station. 4 If you don't have enough memory to edit an animation please refer to section Six, Part A (Low Memory editing). More memory means less chance of a conflict. Professional animators will want at least three Megabytes of memory for serious Animation work, while the non-professional will probably need only 1.5 Megabytes of RAM. At least two floppy drives or a hard disk is recommended, but not required. Animation Station is "seg-loaded". This means that only parts of the program that are needed are loaded at one time. This helps those who have less memory edit animations that are larger. This also means that the Animation Station program disk must ALWAYS be located in a floppy drive unless Animation Station has been installed on a hard disk. HARD DISK INSTALLATION From Workbench: To copy the program and its associated files to your Hard Disk from the Workbench, double click on the "HDInstall" icon located on the "AStation" disk. At this point you will be prompted to "Enter destination for Animation Station files". To install the program onto your "DH0:" hard disk in a directory named "George", you would enter "DH0:George" (no "quotes"). If the directory "George" already exists, you would type "DH0:George/". To abort the installation click on the "close window" gadget located at the upper left corner of the window. When the Installation is complete you may run Animation Station by double clicking on its program icon located in the above given directory. If you wish Animation Station to be installed in the ROOT of a given drive simply give the drive specifier when prompted for a destination. For example, to install the program onto "DH1:" in the root directory simply enter "DH1:" when prompted. 5 From CLI: After you are in a CLI or Shell, you may execute the install program. To do this you must first decide where you wish the program to reside on your hard disk. If you want the program to reside on "DH0:" in the directory named "Animation" then you would type the following. InstallHD DH0:Animation [RETURN] If the directory named "Animation" already exists on the drive "DH0:" then you would be required to append a slash "/" to the end of the directory name. This tells the installation program NOT to create the directory. If the directory does not exist then do NOT put the slash at the end and the installation program will create it for you. When the installation is complete the program is already for execution. STARTING ANIMATION STATION The following paragraphs describe what is needed to run Animation Station on your Amiga computer. It also gives recommendations and hints that will make your life with the program easier and more enjoyable. In addition to the Animation Station program, The Program and Tutorial disks contain several utilities and data files that will be used in the course of this manual. The files "Animation_Station" and "Station.DATA" (on the Program Disk) are required for execution of the program. The program will look for "Station.DATA" in the current directory when executed. If it does not find the file there, it will look for it in the logical directory "AStation:". If the program can not locate this file then execution is terminated immediately. The "Station.CONFIG" file is optional and is used to set certain defaults and settings that the program uses. 6 "InstallHD" is used to install Animation Station onto a Hard Disk and is described in more detail above. "EditCONFIG" is used to edit the Station.CONFIG file from workbench and is also described further in the following sections. In the "UTILs" directory are some tools for creating and managing animations. Appendix E describes these tools in detail. The various files on Animation Station Tutorial diskette are used in Section Four of this manual for instructional purposes. RUNNING THE PROGRAM From Workbench: You must first open Animation Station disk by double clicking on the "AStation" disk icon on your Workbench screen. At this point a window will open revealing the icons for the program and its related files. If this instruction is confusing to you, please consult your "Instruction to the Commodore Amiga 500/2000" manual that came with your computer, and read Chapter 4 entitled "Using the Workbench". In order to run the program from the Workbench, simply double click on the "Animation_Station" program icon. This will begin execution of the program and set the proper system values for you. From CLI: Before you run the program from the CLI you must first open a CLI or SHELL. In order to open a Shell or CLI from Workbench, double click on the "Shell" or "CLI" icon located in the "System" drawer of your workbench disk. NOTE: The sequence [RETURN] means that you are to press the return or enter key on the keyboard. 7 After you are in a CLI, you must set the default stack size before executing the program. The stack MUST be at least 25000. To do this type the following into the CLI window. stack 25000 [RETURN] Now you must make your current directory the same as the directory where the program resides. Providing that you have not executed the HDInstall program and have Animation Station release disk in any floppy drive, then you may type the following into your CLI window. cd AStation: [RETURN] If you have run the HDInstall program, then you must "CD" to the directory in which you installed the program. For instance... cd DH0:Animation [RETURN] After this you are ready to run the program. To do this type the following into your CLI window. Animation_Station [RETURN] The program will now execute. 8 SECTION THREE: SOFTWARE REFERENCE Upon running the program, you will be greeted with the Animation Station title screen. The program will attempt to read the Station.CONFIG file. If Station.Config does not exist, you will be prompted for a temporary storage area to be used for the UNDO Buffer. If you have plenty of memory, designating RAM: will increase the speed of using the UNDO Buffer. It is recommended however, that you use a hard or floppy disk for your UNDO Buffer. This will leave more memory free for Animation Station operations. THE MAIN EDITING SCREEN You will soon notice that Animation Station contains no "Pull-Down=Menus" that are common with other Amiga programs. All functions are available through the two rows of icons on either side of the "StoryBoard" area. The "StoryBoard" area comprises the major portion of the screen and is made up of a matrix of thirty six boxes or frames. Each frame in the "StoryBoard" is representative of a frame in the animation being edited. Animation Station creates a gray scale miniature of each frame of the animation. These miniatures are used for easy identification of the action within the animation. 9 Each frame is numbered starting at 000 and ending with the number of the last frame of the animation. The total number of frames in the animation is displayed in a small box above the right bank of icons. A number is displayed to the left of each row of frames. This is the number of the first frame in that row. Six numbers from "00" to "05" are displayed each below a column of frames. The number of a particular frame can be determined by adding the column number with the low number. A proportional scroll bar appears directly below the "StoryBoard" area. if the animation in memory contains more than thirty six frames, moving the slide bar to the left will display another set of thirty six frames. Clicking on the arrows on either side of the scroll bar will display one additional row of six frames at a time. Above the "StoryBoard" area, the title bar displays the program name and version, and the amount of available CHIP and FAST memory. 10 THE PATHMASTER FILE SELECTOR Animation Station uses the PathMaster File Selector to select directories and file names. When Animation Station requires a filename to complete an operation, such as loading or saving a file, the PathMaster requester will pop up. PathMaster reads your current directory the first time it is used. PathMaster keeps track fo this information between uses, so it never has to re-read a directory unless the directory has changed. Also, if you are finished using PathMaster before it has a chance to read all the entries in the currently selected directory, PathMaster will pick up where it left off reading next time you use it. Warning: You should never remove a disk from a drive when the drive activity light is on! Removing a disk while it is spinning can scramble any information on the disk and possibly cause damage to your drive. It is a good idea to wait five seconds after the light has gone out before removing a disk; this will allow AmigaDOS time to validate the disk. DESCRIPTION OF THE FILE SELECTOR REQUESTER The top two lines in the PathMaster requester are used for informational purposes. The top line displays the current action to be taken by Animation Station, i.e. Load Animation or Save ILBM Picture. The second line shows you the current status of PathMaster. Common status messages are "Reading...", which means that PathMaster is still reading the filenames from the directory, or "Select Filename", which informs you PathMaster has read all the the entries available from the current directory. The status area is also used for displaying any problems or errors encountered while reading a directory or changing paths. For instance, if you select a pathname for a directory that does not exist, the status area will read "Path not Found!". If you remove the disk or change paths to a disk drive with no disk present, the status area will read "No disk in drive!", or "Volume not available!." 11 FILE DISPLAY AREA: The File Display Area gives you information on files and sub-directories the current directory contains. You can select filenames or display sub-directories from the File Display Area by clicking inside the rectangle that surrounds the desired entry. There is room for ten files in the display area at any one time. For each entry, the following information fields are supplied: DATESTAMP TIMESTAMP FILESIZE NAME First, the date of creation (YY-MM-DD). Second, the time of creation (HH-MM-SS). Third, the size of the file entry in bytes, or if the entry is a directory, the work "DIR". The last field is the file or directory name itself. Clicking once with the Left Mouse Button on a file entry will copy that file name into the File String Gadget. Double clicking on a file entry will select that filename as your choice, complete the operation, and return you to the application. If you click on a directory entry (i.e., entries labeled "DIR"), PathMaster will append that directory name to the current path name, and then display any entries available from the sub-directory. SCROLL AND SLIDE GADGETS: If there are more entries in a directory than can be displayed at once, the Scroll Gadgets to the right of the File Display Area can be used to move the list up and down. Clicking once on the up or down arrow gadgets with the Left Mouse Button scrolls the list up or down one entry. Holding the mouse button down for a moment on an arrow starts the auto-repeat feature, scrolling through the list. Due to the dynamic nature of PathMaster, if you try to move the Slide Gadget while entries are still being read from the directory, it may resist your attempt to position it. Using the arrow gadgets instead will result in less conflict during directory reads. STRING GADGETS: Below the File Display Area are the three string gadgets, labeled "PATH", 12 "FILE" and "PATTERN". Click anywhere inside the rectangle to the right of the label to activate the string gadget. A cursor will appear inside the rectangle to indicate that the gadget is ready for you to type in information from the keyboard. When you press [RETURN], the information you typed is processed. The string gadgets use standard Intuition rules and shortcuts for line editing inside the gadget. Note: You must press [RETURN] to actually finish a string entry. If you click the mouse elsewhere before pressing [RETURN], the original string will be restored unchanged. The cursor will disappear when you press [RETURN], signaling that the entry is finished. The PATH string gadget shows the path name to the directory PathMaster is displaying in the File Display Area. Typing in a different path name and pressing [RETURN] will cause PathMaster to display entries in the new directory. Path names may not total more than 300 characters in length. The FILE string gadget shows you the currently selected filename and allows you to type a filename into the space provided. This gadget is automatically activated and ready for typing when PathMaster is invoked by Animation Station. Pressing [RETURN] will select the filename in the string gadget as your final choice, complete the operation, and return you to Animation Station. Note: Legal filenames must be at least one character, and no more than 30 characters in length. If you attempt to enter a filename more than 30 characters long, the screen will flash to warn that no more characters may be entered. As a convenience, if you enter a filename such as "DF1:testfile", PathMaster will divide the name into a path name and filename automatically. Thus, the new path name would be "DF1:" and the new filename would be "testfile". The PATTERN string gadget shows the current pattern that filenames in the File Display Area are filtered through before display. Directory names are always visible regardless of the pattern selected. Normally, the string area will contain the "*" wild card character, which matches all filenames. The string area may contain a pattern other than the "*" character, depending on the type of file operation to be performed. You can type a new filter pattern into the string area and PathMaster will instantly update the File Display Area, showing you only filenames that match the new pattern. 13 Note: If you type in a new pattern and none of the available filenames match the new pattern, the status area will alert you with the message "Nothing matched PATTERN!" ACTION GADGETS: The three Action Gadgets below the String Gadgets allow you to select a filename and return to Animation Station, cancel the selection operations or undo the last path change made. The Load gadget is used to confirm that the filename visible in the File String Gadget is the filename you want Animation Station to use. This gadget may, depending on the operation selected, contain the word, "Load", or "Save". The Cancel gadget allows you to exit PathMaster and abort the current file operation. The Last Dir gadget toggles between the last path name used in PathMaster and the current path name. This can be a convenient way to switch between two commonly used directories; by selecting the first path name, then selecting the second path name, you can use the "Last Dir" gadget to jump from one to the other. DEVICE GADGETS: The six Device gadgets allow you to quickly switch to different directories and logical devices in the AmigaDOS filing system. Clicking on these gadgets will immediately cause a path change and force PathMaster to read the new directory. The Parent gadget moves you one directory closer to the top (root) of a directory structure, i.e., the path name is shortened by one directory name. For example, if your current path name was "DF0:Pictures/Hires", clicking on the parent gadget would change your path name to "DF0:Pictures". Clicking on the gadget again would change the path name to "DF0:". Further clicks would simply re-read drive DF0:, since you are at the root directory now. 14 The Root gadget moves you to the topmost directory of the current directory system, in this case, DF0:. Below the parent and root gadgets are the four logical device gadgets. PathMaster automatically labels these four gadgets with the first four logical devices found in the AmigaDOS filing system. All Amigas currently have the "RAM:" and "DF0:" logical devices available to them. If you do not have an external disk drive or hard disk, the bottom two gadgets will be labeled with the other available logical device names present on your Amiga. If you have more than four logical devices, (e.g., several disk drives, hard disk partitions, recoverable ram disks, etc.) the two small arrow gadgets to the left of the four device gadgets allow you to scroll through the list of available device names. No matter how many devices you have, PathMaster will allow you to select the device you want. Note: AmigaDOS allows device names to be more than three characters. If a device name on the system is more than three characters long, only the first four characters of the name will be displayed on the device gadget label; however, PathMaster uses the full device name when changing path names. SORT GADGETS: The three Sort Gadgets allow you to sort the entries in the File Display Area by different fields; The Alpha Gadget alphabetizes the entries, ignoring case differences. The Size Gadget sorts the entries by file size, smallest file first. The Date Gadget sorts the entries by time of creation, oldest first. Note: Directories, although effected by the sort changes, will always be displayed at the top of the list. These sort selections remain in effect until you select a different sorting method. 15 MAIN EDITING SCREEN ICONS The two columns of icons at either side of the editing screen give you access to all the functions of Animation Station. Below is a listing of the name of each icon. An explanation of each icon and its function appears further in this section. PLAY To play the currently loaded animation simply select the PLAY icon at the top left of the screen. This will cause the program to continuously play the animation until the user aborts by pressing the [ESC] key, or the left mouse button. The animation will play according to the timing information given with the Timing function. FAST PLAY If you wish the program to ignore the given timing information and play as 16 fast as possible, then select the FAST PLAY icon located just under the PLAY icon. This will cause the program to continuously play the animation disregarding the given timing information. INSERT FRAMES Inserting frames into the animation always inserts blank frames. it is then up to you to fill these frames in. Either by loading from disk or copying/moving from another section of the animation. To perform an insert you must have at least one frame selected. If more than one frame is selected then the first frame that is selected will be used. To insert before the selected frame click on the right half of the insert icon. Selecting the left side of the insert icon will cause the insertion of frames after the selected frame. After selecting the insert icon you will be prompted for the number of frames to insert into the animation. After entering a number the insertion will take place. SELECT ALL/NONE Clicking on the right side of this icon will select all the frames in the animation. Clicking on the left side of the icon will de-select all the frames in the animation. MIRROR To mirror (or swap) function is used to reverse the action in an animation. It is used by selecting the frames that you wish to mirror, and selecting the mirror icon. This function will cause the first selected frame to be swapped with the last, the second to be swapped with the second-to-last and so on, such that the animation appears to be playing backwards. 17 GARY SCALE Converts your color animation into a sixteen gray scale animation. Caution: unless your UNDO Buffer is active, there is no way to reverse this procedure. APPEND AT END The append function is used to append pictures to the end of an animation. To use this option you must first have an external picture loaded into memory. If an animation currently exists, one copy of the picture will be added to the end of the animation. If there is no animation in memory when you select the append function, an animation will be created with your picture. Since an animation must consist of at least three frames, the newly created animation will consist of three frames of the current external picture. COLOR PALETTE The palette icon on the left icon bar is used to change the colors of an animation or a particular frame in an animation. Clicking on this icon will display the Animation Station Palette Requester. 18 THE PALETTE REQUESTER The color palette displayed at the bottom of the requester shows the color-map of the first frame of the animation. Animation Station supports color palettes of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 4096 colors. SELECTING A COLOR REGISTER A bracket either above the top row of colors or below the bottom row of colors indicates which color register is the currently selected color. This is the color that will be effected by any changes to the palette. The selected register is changed by simply moving the mouse pointer over the desired color register and clicking the left mouse button. The indicator bracket will move to the newly selected register. ALTERING A COLOR REGISTER VALUE Three slide bars occupy the upper left corner of the requester. These three sliders are labeled Red, Green, and Blue. A numeric value appears to the right of each slider. This number represents the current value of its respective slide bar color. Moving the slide bar gadget to the left or right will decrease or increase its value. An increased value represents an increase in the amount of that color contained in the displayed color. The values of all 19 three colors are used to determine the RGB value or displayed color of the selected register. The numeric range of each color value is "00" to "15", which allows each register to become any one of a possible 4096 colors. The slider gadget can be moved in a number of ways. The most direct method is to: 1) Move the mouse pointer over the slider gadget 2) Click and hold the left mouse button 3) While holding down the left mouse button, move the gadget to the left or right 4) Release the left mouse button Clicking the left mouse button while the mouse pointer is within the slider bar boundaries, but not directly over the slider gadget, will move the gadget one place toward the mouse pointer. You can also click the left mouse button while the mouse pointer is over one of the arrow gadgets located on either side of the slider bar. COPY, SWAP, AND SPREAD These are three fairly common palette manipulations. The Copy function will copy the value of the source register into the destination register so that both registers have the same color value. The Swap function exchanges the color values of the source and destination registers. The Spread function creates a range of color values progressing from the source color to the destination color. For instance, if register 00 contains the color red, and register 15 contains the color yellow, the resulting range of colors will be a progression from red to yellow over sixteen registers. These three palette manipulations are accomplished by clicking on the register to be used as the source register, clicking on the desired function (Copy, Swap, or Spread), then clicking on the destination register. The function is then performed on the two registers, or on the range defined by those two registers. SELECTING A FRAME Unlike other requesters, a frame need not be pre-selected to be edited by the 20 Palette Requester. You can click on the Next and Prev gadgets to select any frame in the animation. The number of the current frame selected is displayed in a box labeled "Frame Number" at the center of the requester, just above the color registers. Moving to another frame after altering the palette does not abort the edit. Every frame of the animation may be edited prior to clicking on the ACCEPT gadget. The animation will not be changed until it is "accepted". You may click on the CANCEL gadget to abort the edit at any time. VIEWING A FRAME For easy identification, you can view the currently selected frame by simply clicking on the VIEW gadget. Press the [Esc] or [SPACE] key, or click on the left mouse button to return to the Palette Requester. This function is for frame identification only. Changes made to the palette are not reflected in the viewed frame until these changes have been accepted, and the requester closed. COLOR INFORMATION Clicking the CALCULATE gadget displays a "color usage" bar graph at the center of the requester. The bar graph displays by percentage, the amount of each color used in the current frame. At the bottom of the graph area, numbers representing color registers, indicate which color register corresponds to which bar in the graph. Notice that the currently selected color register is indicated with a box surrounding its number on the graph. COPY, SWAP, AND SPREAD ACROSS FRAMES Because Animation Station Palette Requester is capable of working with several colormaps at one time, Copy, Swap, and Spread function on the palette level as well as the register level. The Copy function will copy the entire palette of the source frame to the destination frame so that both frames have the same colormap. The Swap function exchanges the colormaps of the source and destination frames. 21 The Spread function creates a range of color values progressing from a register color value in the source frame to the respective register color value in the destination frame. For instance, if frame 1, register 00 contained the color blue, and frame 22, register 00 contained the color red, register 00 would progressively change from blue to red over the period of time it takes to play frames 00 to 22. The calculation for this color spread is done for all the registers. If register 15 however, is white in frames 00 and 22, no change would be evident. To take advantage of the extended function of Copy, Swap, and Spread, use the Next, and Prev gadgets to make the desired source frame the current frame. Then click on the desired function (Copy, Swap, or Spread), and again using the Next, or Prev gadgets, make the desired destination frame the current frame. Clicking anywhere on the color registers on the lowe part of the requester will complete the operation on the two frames or, on the range of frames defined by those two frames. GRAY SCALE CONVERSIONS You can convert any palette to shades of gray by selecting the GRAY gadget. The palette of the current frame will be converted to shades of gray. EDITING ALL FRAMES To the right of the "Frame Number", is a box with the word One. This indicates that only one frame is edited at any one time. Clicking on this toggle gadget changes it so that it reads ALL. In this mode, any changes made to the palette effect all the frames in the animation. You may edit only those registers that remain constant throughout the entire animation. To determine which colors remain constant, click on the CALCULATE gadget while in ALL mode. The bar graph at the center of the requester now displays those colors that remain constant throughout the animation as having a value of 50%. Those color registers that change at some time during the animation are not represented on the graph at all. ABORTING PALETTE CHANGES When the Palette Requester is first activated, a buffer is allocated and the colormap information for the entire animation is copied to that buffer. 22 Clicking on the RESTORE gadget will return the Palette Requester display to the settings stored in the buffer. Modifications to the colormap of the current frame is written to this buffer when another frame is selected by clicking on the Next or Prev gadgets. After the buffer has been modified, clicking on the RESTORE gadget will simply read the new settings and will apparently have no effect. The buffer is immediately updated when changes are made while the Palette Requester is in the ALL mode. This effectively displays the RESTORE function while in this mode. If changes have been made to the buffer that you do not want to become part of the animation, you can still abort all changes by clicking on the CANCEL gadget. This will close the Palette Requester and ignore any changes made. EXITING THE PALETTE REQUESTER When you are done making changes to the Palette Requester, clicking on the ACCEPT gadget will write the changes to the animation in memory, and close the requester. Remember that these changes are not written to the animation stored on disk until the animation is saved to disk. Clicking on the CANCEL gadget will close the Palette Requester, discarding any changes. 23 SPECIAL EFFECTS Select the frame(s) to be modified so that they are highlighted with a red outline, then click on the Special Effects icon to activate the Special Effects Requester. THE SPECIAL EFFECTS REQUESTER The Special Effects Requester has several unrelated functions. One or multiple effects can be performed to one or multiple frames of the animation at any time. Flip - Frames can be flipped on their X or Y axis, or both. Highlight the X, or Y gadgets (or both) under the "Flip" label by clicking on them. They can be de-selected by clicking on them again. If neither the X or Y gadget is selected, no flip will take place. The process will not take place until the PROCEED gadget is selected. 24 Scroll - Over a range of frames, the animation can be scrolled into, or out of the screen. Having the effect take place over more frames, will result in a slower, smoother scroll. Clicking on the IN/OUT toggle gadget will determine the effect of the scroll. Highlighting one of the four arrow gadgets below the "Scroll" label determines the direction of the scroll. If none of the arrow gadgets are selected, no scroll will take place. The process will not take place until the PROCEED gadget is selected. Size - Frames can be reduced in size by one half, resulting in a quarter screen image; or by one fourth, resulting in a one sixteenth size screen image. Clicking on the 1/2 or 1/4 gadgets determines the size of the resulting image. The relative size of the resulting image will be displayed in a box located below the "Size" option gadgets. The image position can be placed anywhere on the screen by placing the representative white box in the desired location within the box. Do this by moving the mouse pointer over the white box, click and hold the left mouse button, move the white box to the desired location, and release the left mouse button. Mosaic - A Mosaic effect can be created on one frame or across a range of frames. A Mosaic effect is similar to the video effect called "Pixelization". This effect blends areas of the frame into larger pixels. Four levels of the Mosaic effect are possible in Animation Station. These levels range from A being the lightest mosaic effect, to D, being the greatest mosaic effect. No mosaic effect is selected when none of the four levels are highlighted. The "From Mosaic" level selector determines the level of mosaic effect to be performed on the first frame of the selected range. The "To Mosaic" level selector determines the level of mosaic effect to be performed on the last frame of the selected range. Animation Station will attempt to perform the mosaic effect on the frames between the first and last selected frame in a progressive manner. 25 A "focused to un-focused" effect can be created over a range of frames by highlighting D on the "To Mosaic" level selector. Having none of the levels selected on the "From Mosaic" level selector, will cause this effect to progress from no pixelization in the first frame to full pixelization in the last selected frame. A constant mosaic effect can be achieved by highlighting the same level in both the "From Mosaic" and "To Mosaic" level selectors. Motion Blur - The Motion Blur effect is available only on Hold and Modify (HAM) animations. Moving the slider gadget to the right increases the amount of blurring to be performed on moving objects within the HAM animation. Animation Station will create a temporary anim file in your UNDO buffer that is approximately the same size as the current animation. X an Y Offset - The animation can be offset within the screen on either the X or Y axis. The numeric value within these string gadgets indicate the number of screen pixels to offset the animation. ACTIVATING THE SPECIAL EFFECT As mentioned earlier, several effects can take place at the same time. It is possible to activate all the above mentioned special effects at the same time. None of the effects will take place until the PROCEED gadget is selected by clicking on it. ABORTING THE SPECIAL EFFECT At any time prior to activating the special effect, clicking on the CANCEL gadget will close the requester without implementing any of the special effects selected. Once the special effect has begun however, there is no way to abort it. 26 BRUSH MOVE After loading an external brush, you can use it in the brush movement requester to define its placement in the animation for each frame. A picture smaller in resolution than the current animation is considered a brush. External pictures and brushes are loaded into the system using the Load ILBM icon. A brush can also be defined from within the program by clicking on the Grab Brush icon. THE BRUSH MOVEMENT REQUESTER The Brush Movement Requester consists of a large rectangular area representing the full animation screen. Various icons and gadgets used in the placement of the brush and defining merge options, appear below ant to the right of the rectangular area. Upon entering the Brush Movement Requester, a solid white box appears in the center of the larger rectangle. This white box represents the current brush in memory. 27 BRUSH PLACEMENT The brush can be placed anywhere within the represented screen area simply by clicking on, and dragging the white box to the desired location. X and Y coordinates are provided at the bottom of the requester to aid in precise placement of the brush. FRAME SELECTION At the bottom of the display, there are three gadgets labeled HOME, AS PREV, and AS NEXT. The HOME gadget will place the brush at the center of the display. The AS PREV gadget will place the brush in the same location as the previous frame. The AS NEXT gadget will place the brush in the same location as the next frame. The number of the frame that is currently being edited will be displayed in a small box to the right of the AS PREV gadget. You can advance to the next frame by clicking on the NEXT gadget at the upper right of the editor screen. You will select the previous frame by clicking on the PREV gadget just below the NEXT gadget. MERGE OPTIONS Located below the PREV icon, the QUICK/SMART toggle gadget is used to specify whether the merge should be quick or smart. The gadget will either display the word "QUICK" or the word "SMART", indicating the merge mode selected. QUICK merge will ignore any and all color information during the merge. SMART merge will try to determine the best color palette possible. The next icon down is the BACK/FRONT toggle gadget used to tell the program to merge the brush in the background or foreground of the animation. SHOW OPTIONS The SHOW IMAGE gadget displays the current frame that you are working on, while the SHOW BRUSH gadget displays the current brush being used. 28 KEY FRAMING The SET KEY icon designates the current frame as a key frame. A small key will appear at the lower right to indicate that the current frame is a key frame. By setting multiple key frames you can specify a motion path without having to place each brush. For instance, assume the first frame of an animation is a key frame, and the brush is located at the upper left of the frame. Also assume that the last frame of the animation is also a key frame and the brush is located at the lower right of the frame. Clicking on the Make Key gadget will cause the program to calculate the path between the brush locations in the two key frames. In the frames between the two key frames, the brush will be located at equal distances along this path. The resulting animation, when played, will display a smooth movement of the brush from the upper left of the frame to the lower right of the frame. By setting several key frames in the animation, a complex motion path can be created. Each subsequent key frame is used as the start and end points for each segment of the motion path to be created. Selecting the SHOW gadget will display the current motion path that you have defined. EXITING THE BRUSH MOVEMENT REQUESTER Clicking on the Accept gadget at the lower left corner of the requester will implement all brush movements into the animation and close the requester. Clicking on the Cancel gadget will discard any changes and close the requester, leaving the animation unaffected. 29 TIMING Timing information can be set for individual or multiple frames. This includes the synchronization of sounds as well as frame delays. To set the timing of sound synchronization for a particular frame or group of frames, select the frame(s) and then click on the Timing icon. THE FRAME TIMING REQUESTER The number of the currently selected frame is displayed at the top of the Timing Requester. Any modifications made to the Timing Requester will effect only this frame unless otherwise specified. The "Timing" delay string gadget is located just below the frame number. Setting a numeric value in this string gadget will effect how long that frame appears on the screen when the animation is being played. This numeric value specifies the number of jiffies (One jiffy = 1/60th second), to display the frame. For instance, if Frame Number 000 had a timing delay of 60, then it would be displayed for one full second when the animation is played. 30 This feature aids in the creation of smaller sized, longer playing animations. Instead of adding multiple, duplicate copies of the frame, the frame is simply displayed for a predetermined length of time. To the right of the "Timing" string gadget, the "Delta" size of the current frame is displayed. The "Delta" size is determined by the differences from the previous frame to the current frame. Remember that only the differences (delta) between frames is stored in an anim file (See Appendix C for more information about the "ANIM" file format). Storing complete frames in an animation would result in extremely large files for relatively short playing animations. FRAME SELECTION Upon opening of the Frame Timing Requester, the frame number of the first frame selected is displayed. Any changes made to the requester will effect only the current frame. Clicking on the NEXT gadget makes the next selected frame the current frame. Clicking on the PREV gadget makes the previous selected frame the current frame. If only one frame was selected, the NEXT and PREV gadgets will have no effect. Clicking on the ALL gadget will copy the settings of the current frame to all the selected frames. ADDING SOUND The Amiga's stereo sound capabilities allow much flexibility in the addition of sound to animation. Any two sounds may be heard through either the left or right speaker channel. Up to four different sounds may be played at the same time. Animation Station handles a sound as either a Foreground or Background sound. A foreground sound is played once and terminated. A background sound is played repeatedly for the duration of the animation. Animation Station allows up to four background sounds OR four foreground sounds OR any combination of four sounds to be played at once. SOUND FILE DESIGNATION The four larger string gadgets allow you to designate up to two foreground 31 and two background sound files to be started at the current frame. You are not limited as to the number of different sound files used in an animation! The only limitation is that only four sounds can be played simultaneously. If four sounds are currently being played and another sound is started, the sound that was started first would be terminated to allow the newest sound to play. Sound path and filenames may be entered directly into any of the four Sound File string gadgets. Clicking on any of the labels ("Fore #1", "Fore #2", "Back #1", or "Back #2"), will activate the system file requester to aid in file selection. Note: Sounds are placed in CHIP RAM. Using large sound files, or multiple sound files may severely deplete available CHIP memory. SETTING SOUND VOLUME The volume of each sound file can be controlled by setting the numeric value in the string gadget to the right of each Sound File string gadget. This string gadget (labeled with the letter "V"), can contain any numeric value from 0 (no sound) to 64 (full volume). To the right of each volume setting is the speaker channel designation. Clicking on the L, or R will cause the designated sound to be played through the Left, or Right speaker respectively. When the animation is saved, a ".Audio" file will be created for the animation. This file, as well as the sound files used for the animation will need to be present for the animation to be played with all sound information. See Appendix C for details on the ".Audio" file format. EXITING THE FRAME TIMING REQUESTER Clicking on the PROCEED gadget implements all timing and sound changes in the current animation, and closes the requester. Clicking on CANCEL closes the requester, ignoring any timing or sound changes. 32 GRAB BRUSH The Brush Movement Requester can us an external brush loaded from disk, or one defined from within Animation Station using the Grab Brush function. The grab brush function allows you to grab a rectangular area from any frame in the animation, and store it as the current external picture. This is done by selecting the desired frame and clicking on the GRAB BRUSH icon. The selected frame will be displayed, allowing you to define the brush. The brush is defined in the following manner: 1) Move the mouse pointer to the point on the frame that will become the upper left corner of the defined brush. Click the left mouse button and release. 2) Move the mouse pointer to the lower right corner of the area to be defined. A box is drawn on the screen showing the area that will be "grabbed". Click the left mouse button again. The area inside the displayed box will be saved to the temporary buffer as the current external picture (remember a brush is nothing more than a picture, smaller than the current screen size). This newly defined brush can now be used with the brush movement function described in the Brush move section. CROP The Crop function allows you to remove the picture area from a defined area of any selected frame(s). It is possible to delete the area outside or inside a defined box. This is done by first selecting the frame(s) that you want to crop, and clicking on the Crop icon. The first selected frame will be displayed, allowing you to define the area to be cropped. The crop area is defined in the following manner: 33 1) Move the mouse pointer to the point on the frame that will become the upper left corner of the defined area. Click the left mouse button and release. 2) Move the mouse pointer to the lower right corner of the area to be defined. A box is drawn on the screen showing the area that will be cropped. Click the left mouse button again. This procedure will remove the area outside the defined box. Drawing the box from the lower right corner to the upper left corner will remove the area inside the defined box. FAST MODE/STORYBOARD MODE TOGGLE Warning: Clicking on this icon will remove the storyboard representation of the icon. Fast mode allows you to use the program without a storyboard. The benefit is that less time is needed by the program to update the storyboard each time a change is made. The drawback is that frames are more difficult to identify for editing. You may want to use fast mode when you are performing a series of global effects on the entire animation. This type of operation does not require you to select a specific frame, but rather, a group of frames, or the entire animation is selected. You may want to use the storyboard mode when editing specific individual frames to create a unique effect. Setting the timing or adding sound to an animation is a common operation for which quick frame identification is useful. TOGGLING BETWEEN FAST MODE AND STORYBOARD MODE If the loaded animation currently has a storyboard, clicking on the Fast/Storyboard icon will remove the storyboard. If the animation currently does 34 not display a storyboard, clicking on this icon will cause Animation Station to examine the animation and create a miniature representation of each frame to be displayed in the storyboard. Depending on the size and resolution of the animation, this can be a lengthy process. SAVE ILBM You may want to modify the contents of an individual frame of an animation using an external paint program. Since an "ANIM" format file cannot be loaded directly into a paint program, the individual frame(s) to be modified must be extracted from the animation and saved in IFF format. Animation Station allows you to select one or more frames of an animation and save them as complete IFF format pictures. To save one or more frames, select the frame(s) you want to save and click on the SAVE ILBM icon. When the file selector appears, enter a name for the picture to be saved and click on the SAVE gadget. The frame will be saved as an IFF format picture with the designated filename. If more than one frame was selected, each selected frame will be saved individually with a unique filename. The designated filename will be appended with ".0", ".1", ".2", etc. LOAD ILBM Just as you are able to use pictures saved from Animation Station with other graphic programs, you can use IFF pictures created with other programs in Animation Station. The LOAD ILBM function, with its many options, is used for this purpose. FILE SPECIFICATIONS If no animation is currently loaded in Animation Station, then any external picture file can be loaded. Otherwise, the picture to be loaded must have the 35 same number of bitplanes (number of colors) as the animation in memory. If the external IFF file is of the same resolution as the animation in memory, it is considered a "Picture". If the external IFF file is of smaller resolution than the animation in memory, it is considered a "Brush". LOADING A PICTURE A picture can be loaded directly into one or more frames of the animation, or it can be loaded into Animation Station's temporary buffer to be used in a merge operation. To load a picture directly into one or more frames in the current animation, select the frames to be replaced and click on LOAD ILBM. When the file requester appears, select the filename of the picture to load and click on the LOAD gadget. The selected frames of the animation will be replaced by the external file. If no frames are selected during the load process, the external picture will be loaded into the temporary buffer to be used in other operations. LOADING A BRUSH A brush may be loaded into the temporary buffer to be used with the Brush Movement function. If any frames are selected during the load process, Animation Station will attempt to replace the selected frames with the brush. Since a brush by definition, is of a smaller resolution than the loaded animation, the replacement will be rejected. TEMPORARY STORAGE When not being loaded directly into selected frames of the animation, the external picture is loaded into a temporary storage area as defined in the Station.Config file (See Appendix B for more information on the custom configuration of Animation Station). Only one external file, picture or brush can be loaded into this temporary storage area at any one time. Loading a new file will erase the previously 36 loaded picture. Pictures loaded into this temporary storage area are available for use with Animation Station Merge or Brush Movement functions. AUTOMATIC ANIMATION CREATION In the event that Animation Station cannot locate the given picture, it will look for a group of pictures with the given name appended with ".0", ".1", etc. If found, each successive picture will be loaded as the next selected frame of the animation. To make use of this feature, name the IFF pictures to be loaded as an animation with the desired name appended with ".0", ".1", etc. Using the filename of "Pic", the files would be named "Pic.0", "Pic.1", "Pic.2", etc. Click on the LOAD ILBM icon. When the file requester appears, designate the file to be loaded as "Pic" (not "Pic.0"). Animation Station will not find "Pic", so it will look for "Pic.0". If "Pic.0" is found, it will be loaded as the first frame of a new animation. The files "Pic.1", "Pic.2", etc. will be loaded as subsequent frames of the newly created animation. The filenames must be sequential. If "Pic.3" were missing, but "Pic.4" through "Pic.20" existed, any files beyond "Pic.3" would be ignored. If an animation already existed in memory and frames are selected for replacement, the first frame will be replaced by the "Pic.0". The second selected frame will be replaced with "Pic.1", etc. until all the selected frames are replaced. If fifteen frames of the animation are selected and only ten sequential pictures exist, frames "00" through "09" will be replaced by "Pic.0" through "Pic.9", and frames "10" through "14" will be replaced by "Pic.0" through "Pic.4". SAVE ANIM After you are done editing your animation, you must save your edited animation to disk to preserve your work. With no frames selected, click on the SAVE ANIM icon. When the file requester appears, select the desired animation file to replace, or type in a new filename, and click on the SAVE ILBM gadget. 37 If you wish, you can also save a portion of the animation in memory. To do this, select the frames of the current animation to comprise the new animation to be saved, and click on the SAVE ANIM icon. When the file requester appears, select the desired animation file to replace, or type in a new filename, and click on the SAVE gadget. LOAD ANIM The LOAD ANIM function is used to load an animation into memory (if none exists), append an existing animation to the current animation held in memory, or merge an existing animation with the current animation. To load an animation into Animation Station (if none is currently loaded), simply click on the LOAD ANIM icon. When the file requester appears, select the desired directory path and filename of the animation to be loaded, and click on the LOAD gadget. The selected animation will be loaded into memory. If the selected animation is accompanied by a storyboard file, it will automatically be loaded. If the selected animation does not have an accompanying storyboard file, Animation Station will ask you if you wish to create one. MERGING AND APPENDING ANIMATIONS If you attempt to load an animation having the same resolution and number of bitmaps as the currently loaded animation, you will be given several loading options. The are as follows: Append to current Animation - Adding the animation to the end of the currently loaded animation. Precede current Animation - Placing the animation before the currently loaded animation. 38 Overlay current Animation - Placing the animation on top of the currently loaded animation. Underlay current Animation - Placing the animation behind the currently loaded animation. You are also given the option of merging the bitmaps using the Quick or Smart method as described in the section on the Brush Movement requester. MOVE One or more selected frames may be moved from their current position to a new position in the animation. Select the frame(s) to be moved and click on the MOVE icon. Move the mouse pointer over the first selected frame to be moved, and click and hold the left mouse button. The frames to be moved will be highlighted by a blue outline. While holding down the left mouse button, move the highlighted boxes to the desired position and release the left mouse button to complete the move operation. The moved frames will be deleted from their current location and copied on top of (not inserted between) the destination frames. If you want to move frames between currently existing frames, you will need to insert the number of frames to be moved between the desired frames prior to the move operation. COPY One or more selected frames may be copied to a new position in the animation. Select the frame(s) to be copied and click on the COPY icon. Move the mouse pointer over the first selected frame to be copied, and click and hold the left mouse button. The frames to be copied will be highlighted by a blue outline. While holding down the left mouse button, move the highlighted boxes to the desired position and release the left mouse button to complete the copy operation. 39 This operation differs from the MOVE operation only in that the selected frames are not deleted from their original position. VIEW One or more frames of the animation may be viewed by selecting the desired frame(s) and clicking on the VIEW icon. The first selected frame will be displayed. Pressing the left mouse button will display the next selected frame. Pressing the [ESC] key or the [SPACE] key will abort the view process. You can also double click on the desired frame that you wish to view. This will cause the program to view that frame. Pressing the left mouse button again will stop the view process. MERGE When a picture having the same resolution and number of bitplanes as the currently loaded animation has been loaded into the temporary storage area, it may be merged with the current animation. After loading the desired picture to merge, click on the MERGE icon. The Merge requester will appear. A different merge requester will appear for a HAM picture than for a non-HAM picture. MERGING NON-HAM PICTURES There are three options that can be set in the merge requester for a non-HAM picture and animation. QUICK OR SMART Quick merge will simply place the picture in the background or foreground and assume it has the same palette as the animation frame it is merging with. The Smart option will force the program to look at the animation and 40 pictures palette, and decide upon a new palette that is best for the new animation. ALL OR SELECTED FRAMES When the MERGE icon is selected, the requester will be activated whether any frames are selected or not. By default, the merge function will effect All Frames. You do have the option to select one or more frames prior to activating the merge function. Click on the Selected gadget to cause the merge function to effect only those frames previously selected. FRONT OR BACK You also have the option to merge the picture in Front of, or in Back of the current animation. MERGING HAM PICTURES Hold and Modify (HAM) palettes must be handled differently due to their complexity. The Quick and Smart options do not apply to HAM images or animation. A form of the Smart merge is always used with HAM images. You are given however, the ability to alter the importance of the picture or the animation. In place of the Smart and Quick gadgets, a slide gadget with sixteen different value positions exists. A value of 0 gives the background precedence, while a value of 15 gives the foreground precedence. A value of 8 gives equal precedence to both foreground and background. MERGING PROGRESS When merging operations are taking place, Animation Station will attempt to display the process. When this is not possible (due to the lack of available chip ram), a progress requester will be displayed for informative purposes only. 41 UNDO When the UNDO buffer is active, clicking on the UNDO icon will discard the most recent change to the animation. DISK INFO Clicking on the Disk Info icon will display a requester with the following information: THE DISK INFO REQUESTER Device - The current device for which the additional information is given. You may change the selected device by entering the new device designation directly into the string gadget or by clicking on one of the device gadgets at the bottom of the requester. Free Bytes - The storage space available on the selected device. 42 Animation - The approximate amount of storage space required to store the current animation. Selected - The approximate amount of storage space required to store the selected frames (if any) of the animation. Clicking on the PROCEED gadget at the bottom of the requester will exit the Disk Info requester. CLEAR FRAME You amy erase the contents of any frames in an animation without deleting them. Select the frames you wish to clear and click on the Clear Frame icon. The contents of the selected frames will be cleared, leaving a blank frame in its place. DELETE Selected frames may be deleted from the animation simply by clicking on the Trashcan (delete) icon. The frames will be deleted from the animation, reducing the frame count at the upper right of the screen. 43 Section Four: Animation Station Tutorials It can be said that the power of Animation Station is greater than the sum of its individual functions. The best way to demonstrate how to use this power is to take you step by step through a number of tutorial sessions. All the tutorials, if done one after another should take you between one and two hours. All the files necessary to complete the tutorial sessions are included on the supplied disks. It is recommended however, that you take time after each tutorial to experiment with some of your own animations before going on to the next session. This will give you the opportunity to apply what you have learned in the tutorial to your own work. Please proceed with the tutorials in the order in which they are presented. Each tutorial session builds upon the concepts that were presented in the previous session. Editor's Note: These tutorials are designed to introduce you to the functions of Animation Station. If you follow the tutorial instructions exactly, your animations will look exactly like mine. If you don't follow the instructions exactly, it won't. Not following the tutorial instructions exactly isn't wrong. A self guided tour through Animation Station could do as much for you as these tutorials. Since this is a creative package, I believe that creativity in learning the program should be encouraged. Tutorial One: Basic Editor Functions Load Animation Station if not already loaded. Double click on the program icon from the Workbench, or refer to Section Two of this manual for instructions on how to load Animation Station from the CLI. After a few seconds of loading the program, the title screen will appear. Click on the mouse button or press any key to continue. The main editor screen will appear. This screen is used for all editing operations. For a more complete description of this screen and its icons please refer to Section Three "Software Reference." 44 Load An Animation into memory by clicking on the LOAD ANIM icon (located on the right column of icons.) When the file requester appears, locate and double-click on the animation file named "Anim1" (located in the "ANIMs" directory of the tutorial disk). If you are unfamiliar with the operation of this type of requester, refer to Section Two of this manual for additional information on the use of this requester. After selecting a file, the main edit screen will reappear and loading of the animation will begin. Notice that the mouse pointer has become the image of a "floppy disk" indicating that disk access is taking place. It will alternate between this image and the image of a "light bulb" indicating that the program is making some sort of calculation or "thinking". If the program has any problem loading the animation an error message will appear. When loading is complete, Animation Station will update the storyboard and the mouse pointer will reappear. Play the loaded animation by clicking on the Play icon (located at the top of the left column of icons). After viewing the animation, return to the main edit screen by either clicking the left mouse button or pressing the [Esc] escape key on the keyboard. WORKING WITH FRAME PLACEMENT Select frames 18 through 35. Place your pointer over frame number 18, and click the left mouse button. Frame 18 will now be highlighted with a red outline. You can click on each frame you want to select, or you can click and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse so that the pointer touches each frame you want to select. When all desired frames are selected, release the left mouse button. If any frames were unintentionally selected, they may be de-selected in the same manner. Reminder: The number of a frame is determined by adding the number that appears at the left of that row of frames with the number at the bottom of the column. Frame number 18 should be the fourth down on the far left. Delete frames 18 through 35 from the animation by clicking on the Trashcan icon (located at the bottom of the right column of icons). You will be prompted for verification on this operation. At this point, select the OK gadget on the verification requester. 45 Your pointer will display a "light bulb", and a blue box will flash at the lower left of the screen. The "light bulb" indicates the program is "thinking". There are times when the program will be "thinking" for a very long time. The flashing blue box is simply added assurance that the program has not failed in some way. As long as the box is flashing, the program is operating. When the delete process is complete you can view the result by clicking on the Play icon again. Feel free to play the animation at any time during the tutorial sessions. Insert 18 frames AFTER the last frame by selecting the last frame (17) and selecting the left side of the Insert icon. You will be prompted for the number of frames to insert into the animation. Enter the number 18 into the string gadget and press [RETURN]. The process of inserting 18 blank frames after frame number 17 will now begin. All frames that are inserted will be blank frames, which means that they will consist entirely of background color. Reminder: Selecting the right side of the insert icon will cause the insertion of frames BEFORE the selected frame. If more than one frame is selected then the first selected frame is used. Copy the first 18 frames to the last 18 frames. First select the source frames (0-17) for copying. Then click on the COPY icon (located on the right icon column). The icon should become highlighted (brighter in color). Click and hold on the FIRST selected (red highlighted) frame. The selected frames will be come highlighted with a blue outline. Move the mouse pointer to the first destination frame, in this case frame 18, and release the mouse button. You will be asked to verify that you wish to overwrite frames 18 through 35. Click on the OK gadget on the requester and the copy process will complete. Please wait for the mouse pointer to return before proceeding. Mirror frames 18 through 35 by selecting the desired frames (18 through 35), and clicking on the Mirror icon (located on the left icon column). This operation will swap frames 18 and 35, 19 and 34, 20 and 33 and so on. When the mouse pointer returns, play the animation to see the result. Note: Only frames 18 through 35 should be selected. If any other frames are selected, they will be acted upon by the mirror operation. 46 WORKING WITH COLOR Change the colormap of the animation to shades of gray by selecting the desired frames (in this case all frames), and clicking on the Gray Scale icon on the left icon column. The animation should now be converted into shades of gray. Reminder: Since all frames should be selected, you can either select each frame using the method described earlier in this tutorial, or you can click on the right half of the All icon (located on the left icon column). Change the background color of the animation. No frames need to be highlighted for this operation. Click on the Palette icon (located on the left icon column). When the Palette Requester appears, click on the ONE gadget. It will change to show the word ALL. This means that you are now in ALL mode. All mode simply means that when you modify a color it effects ALL frames of the animation instead of the current frame only. When in ALL mode, Animation Station will allow you to modify only those color registers that remain the same throughout the entire animation. Click on the CALCULATE gadget to determine which color registers remain constant throughout the animation. The palette bar graph will display those registers remaining constant as having a value of 50%. Those color registers which do not remain constant will have no value. Notice that register 0 is currently selected. This is indicated by the bracket above it in the palette, as well as the box surrounding the number 0 in the bar graph. Clicking on any other color register in the palette will select that register. Be sure color register 0 is selected by clicking on register 0 in the palette. Adjust the Red, Green, and Blue slider gadgets above so that red is equal to 15, Green is equal to 0, and Blue is equal to 0. Color register 0 should now be a bright red. We can either accept these alterations to the palette or cancel them. We wish to accept them, so click on the ACCEPT gadget at the lower left just above the color bars. The program will now think awhile, adjusting the animation 47 and storyboard information. When it is complete, take a look at the animation by selecting the Play icon. WORKING WITH BRUSHES Load an IFF brush for use with the brush movement function. We want the picture to be loaded into temporary storage for our next operation so make sure that NO frames are selected Click on the left half of the Select All icon on the left icon column. Reminder: Whenever loading a picture or brush, the program can either load it into the selected frames or into a temporary storage area. If ANY frames are selected, the program will REPLACE the selected frames with the new IFF picture. If no frames are selected the program will load the picture into temporary storage. Click on the LOAD ILBM icon (located on the right icon column. When the file requester appears, select the file named "FUNNYFACE" located in the "ILBMs" directory on the tutorial disk. After selecting the proper file, the program will load it and place it into the temporary area. Define a motion path for the brush for all frames in the animation by selecting all frames with the Select All icon, and clicking on the Brush Movement icon (located on the left icon column). When the Brush Motion Requester appears, notice the solid white box in the center of the screen surrounded by a larger rectangle. This white box represents the size and position of the loaded brush in relation to the display screen (represented by the larger rectangle). You can move the brush representation anywhere inside the screen rectangle by dragging the white box around with the mouse. Verify that the Frame Number indicated at the bottom of the requester is 0. Place the brush representation at the upper left corner of the screen box. The numbers labeled X and Y at the bottom of the screen should display zero. Set this frame as a KEY frame by clicking on the SET KEY gadget (located on the right side of the requester). The image of a key should appear at the bottom of the screen indicating that this is a key frame. 48 Advance to frame number 9 by clicking on the NEXT gadget (located on the right side of the requester), nine times. The "Frame Number" should now read "9". Place the brush representation at the upper right corner of the screen rectangle, and click on the SET KEY gadget. Advance to frame number 18 and place the brush rectangle at the lower right corner of the screen box. Click on the SET KEY gadget. Advance to frame number 27 and place the brush rectangle at the lower left of the screen box. Click on the SET KEY gadget. Advance to frame number 35 and place the brush rectangle so that the X value at the bottom of the screen reads 0, and the Y value reads 39. Click on the SET KEY gadget. Click on the MAKE KEY gadget to establish the motion path defined by the key frames. View the motion path by clicking on the SHOW gadget. The brush representation should move, showing the defined motion path. Set the FRONT/BACK gadget to "BACK", so that the brush will be merged into the background of the animation. If the gadget is not set to BACK, do so by clicking on the BACK/FRONT gadget on the right. Set the QUICK/SMART gadget to "QUICK" so that palette information will be ignored during the merge. Setting this gadget to "Smart" would also work, but it would take more time for the program to calculate the best colormap for both the animation and the brush. Start the brush merge operation by clicking on the ACCEPt gadget at the bottom of the requester. When the operation is complete, play the animation to review the results. WORKING WITH TIMING Alter the timing for the first frame of the animation by selecting frame 0 and clicking on the Frame Timing icon (located on the left icon column). When the Frame Timing Requester appears, change the "Timing" string gadget from "0" to a value of "30". 49 This will cause the first frame of the animation to remain on the screen for a period of one half second since one jiffy is 1/60th of a second. Click on the ACCEPT gadget to implement the timing change and return to the main editing screen. Play the animation to see the results of the timing change. SAVING YOUR WORK Reminder: When saving an animation, Animation Station will save only those frames that have been selected. If there are no frames selected then the program assumes that you wish to save the entire animation. Check the storage space needed for the animation by clicking on the Disk Info icon (located on the right icon column). The Disk Info Requester will allow you to: 1) see the approximate space needed to store the selected frames or the entire animation, 2) check free space on your storage medium. Clicking on one of the device gadgets will display the disk information for that gadget. If you have been working from floppy disk, we suggest that you place a blank formatted disk into any drive at this time. Click on the SAVE ANIM icon (located on the right icon column). When the file requester appears, you will be prompted for a filename. Enter any name that you wish with the directory path pointing to the new blank disk you have just inserted. After the filename has been entered and accepted, you will be given the option to alter the resolution and display mode of the animation during the save process. The current resolution and display mode of the animation are indicated by the highlighted selections. At this point simply click on the PROCEED gadget at the lower left of the requester. Since no changes were made to this requester, no display mode alterations will be made to the animation during the save. 50 CLEARING THE ANIMATION FROM MEMORY After you have saved your work to disk, you may want to work with another animation. If you were to attempt to load another animation while one was still in memory, Animation Station would try to merge the two animations. You will need to remove the current animation from memory in order to work with a new animation. Select all the frames using the All Frames icon, and click on the Trashcan icon. You will be asked for verification that you wish to delete ALL frames of the animation. Click on the OK gadget to remove the animation from memory. You have now completed the first tutorial. You may want to experiment with what you have learned on one of your own animations before moving on to the next tutorial. Or you may simply click on the EXIT icon at the bottom of the screen to close the Animation Station screen and end program execution. Tutorial Two: Creating Animations From Individual Pictures This tutorial will take you through the process of creating an animation from a group of individual IFF pictures. It will also cover the foreground/background picture merge function and touch on the brush movement features. The final animation will be of a boy throwing, and catching a frisbee. This tutorial is presented in a bit more casual manner than in the previous tutorial session. By this time you should be more familiar with the Animation Station interface. Make sure that Animation Station is up and running and that there is no animation currently in memory. When loading pictures, Animation Station has the ability to 1) replace selected frames of the animation, 2) store the picture for later use, and if no animation is in memory it has the ability to 3) load a group of pictures and create an animation from them. It is this third loading option that we are going to perform. 51 PICTURE PREPARATION Before we can create an animation from a group of pictures, certain conditions must first be met. First, no animation can currently exist in memory. Second, there must exist a group of pictures of the same resolution and number of bitplanes to load as the animation. This group of pictures must be given the same name with an ascending numeric suffix. The numeric suffix will tell Animation Station in which order to place the pictures to create the animation. A group of eighteen pictures meeting these conditions has been provided for you on the tutorial disk. The files "frisbee.0" through "frisbee.17" will be used to create our animation. LOADING THE PICTURES Start the loading process by clicking on the LOAD ILBM icon. When the file requester appears, you will be prompted for a filename. Enter the filename "frisbee" (no quotes) into the string gadget and press [RETURN]. Notice that no numeric suffix was included in the file name. We are telling Animation Station to load a file that does not exist. When the program fails to find the file named "frisbee" it will attempt to load "frisbee.0" and any successive files thereafter. Animation Station will complete the loading process when it fails to find the next successive file, in this case "frisbee.18". You will be asked whether or not you want Animation Station to create a storyboard file for this animation. Creating a storyboard will aid us in identification of individual frames during the remainder of this tutorial. Click on the PROCEED gadget. Play the animation at this time. You will see a man throwing a frisbee. You will also notice that the motion is slightly faster than we really want. Press the [ESC] key or click the left mouse button to stop the play function and return to the edit screen. 52 SLOWING THE ANIMATION We now want to slow down the animation. This is done by changing the timing for all frames of the animation. Click on the Select All icon, and then click on the Frame Timing icon. You will be presented with the Frame Timing Requester. Enter a value of "4" into the string gadget labeled "Timing". This gives the first frame a timing of four jiffies. Click on the ALL gadget at the bottom of the requester to copy this timing value to ALL of the selected frames. Verify that all frames have a timing value of "4" by clicking on the NEXT and PREV gadgets to move to other frame timing definitions. Now click on the PROCEED gadget at the lower left of the requester to close the requester and implement the timing changes. Play the animation at this time to verify that the animation plays slower than before. Each frame of the animation remains on the screen for four jiffies, or 1/15th of a second (four jiffies = 4/60th sec = 1/15th sec). INDIVIDUAL TIMING TO CREATE AN EFFECT Notice that the frisbee returns to the boy rather quickly. More realism can be added to this part of the animation by slowing motion down during his wait for the return of the frisbee. Click on the Deselect All icon to make sure that no frames are currently selected and then select frame number 11. Click on the Frame Timing icon to return to the Frame Timing Requester. The timing information for frame number 11 will be displayed. Notice that clicking on the NEXT and PREV gadgets have no function since only one frame was selected prior to the activation of the Frame Timing icon. Change the timing value to "50", and click on the PROCEED gadget. Playing the animation now will show that the boy waits a little while before the frisbee returns to him. 53 OFFSETTING THE ANIMATION Later we will be merging a picture into the background of this animation. For compositional purposes, it would be better if the boy were located a little to the right of his current position. This is best done prior to the merge so that the merged picture remains centered. Click on the Select All icon to highlight all the frames of the animation and then click on the FX icon. When the Special Effects Requester appears, enter a value of "30" into the X Offset string gadget. This tells the program that all selected frames should be moved to the right 30 pixels. Click on the PROCEED gadget and the program will perform the operations for you. When the Offset is complete, the boy should have moved to the right. Had you wanted to move him to the left, you would have entered a negative number. ADDING A BACKGROUND Remember, before a picture can be merged into the background, it must be loaded into memory. Make sure that there are no frames selected in the animation and then click on the LOAD ILBM icon. Select the file named "Background2" located in the "ILBMs" directory of the tutorial disk. After the picture has been loaded, we can perform a merge into the background of one or more frames of the animation. Click on the MERGE icon. When the Merge Requester appears, you will be given some options on how to perform the merge. Make sure that the QUICK, BACK, and ALL FRAMES gadgets are highlighted. This tells the program that we want to perform a quick merge because we know that the color palettes match for the animation and picture. That we also want the program to merge the picture into the BACKGROUND, and that we want the merge to occur on ALL FRAMES of the animation. Click on the PROCEED gadget to start the merging process. When Animation Station has completed the merge operation, play the animation. You will now see the original animation of the boy throwing the frisbee against a park like background. 54 PLACING OBJECTS INTO THE ANIMATION In the previous tutorial, we used the Brush Movement Requester to move a loaded brush about the screen. We will now use the BRUSH functions to place a sun at a single location in the sky. Make sure that no frames are selected and click on the LOAD ILBM icon. Load the "Sun" picture located on the tutorial diskette in the "ILBMs" directory. This picture is considered a brush because it's resolution is smaller than that of the current animation. Click on the Select All icon to highlight all frames of the animation. Now click on the Brush Movement icon. When the Brush Movement Requester appears, place the brush at X location 62 and Y location 16 and click on the SET KEY gadget. Click on the PREV gadget to make the last frame of the animation the current frame. Click on the AS NEXT gadget to place the current brush in the same location as the brush in the next frame. Click on the SET KEY gadget to make this key a key frame also. You have now set the first and last frames as key frames. Click on the MAKE KEY gadget to create the motion path based on the key frames. Since both key frames were at the same location, all frames in between will be set to this location. Click on the SHOW gadget to verify that the brush remains at the same location. Set the merge options to FRONT, and QUICK. The "Sun" brush will be merged in the foreground, and the merge process will ignore palette information since the brush has the same palette as the current animation. When you have finished setting your merge options, click on the ACCEPT gadget to start the merge operation. When the merge is complete, play the animation. A sun now appears in a stationary position throughout the animation. You may save your work as a new animation if you wish. 55 Tutorial Three: Advanced Editor Features In this tutorial we will construct an animation from two pictures and a brush. We will show the picture append feature, the brush movement definition functions, palette editing operations, the mirror function, and frame timing features. The final animation will be a simple sunrise sequence. At this point it is assumed that no animation is currently loaded into memory. LOADING THE FIRST PICTURE First we will load an IFF picture into memory. Click on the LOAD ILBM icon. When the file requester appears, you will be prompted for a filename. Enter "Background" into the filename string gadget. This file is located in the ILBMs directory on the tutorial disk. After the picture is loaded into memory, we can begin to create our animation. CREATING THE ANIMATION We want an animation of 32 frames consisting of the background picture that we have just loaded. Click on the Append icon to create an animation using the current external picture. Since an animation must consist of at least three frames, Animation Station will create an animation consisting of three frames of the background picture that we loaded. Since we want a total of 32 frames we must somehow add 29 more frames of the same picture to the animation. We can use a number of methods to achieve this. We could 1) use the append function to append the picture 29 more time, 2) insert 29 frames after the last frame and use copy function to copy the three frames to the other 29, or 3) use the LOAD ILBM function to directly load the "Background" picture into the 29 inserted frames. As you can see there are a number of methods to accomplish the same thing. Which one you use is up to you. You will notice that there are fewer and fewer bolded prompts in the tutorial as we go along. This is because you will be making more decisions as to how to obtain the desired effect. 56 When the animation consists of 32 frames (the number of frames is displayed at the upper right of the display), try playing the animation to be sure everything was done correctly. You should see a sky background picture that has no ground. There will be no movement in the animation since none has been added yet. ADDING MOTION We will now add the sun rising using the brush movement functions. Click on the LOAD ILBM icon and load the "Sun" file (used in the previous tutorial) as a brush. When the program has loaded the file, we are ready to define its motion path. Since we want the sun to appear in ALL frames of the animation we must select all the frames for editing. When all frames have been highlighted, click on the Brush Movement icon. When the Brush Movement Requester appears, the "Frame Number" displayed at the bottom of the screen is "0". This number represents the first selected frame. For instance, if frame number 10 was the first selected frame in the storyboard, then frame 10 would be displayed as Frame Number "0". If the second selected frame was 15, then frame fifteen would be displayed as Frame Number "1". Clicking on the NEXT and PREV gadgets would move you to the next or previously selected frame in the animation, and change the frame number displayed at the bottom by one. Move the brush representation to the X, Y coordinate of 114, 145. The X and Y coordinates are displayed at the bottom of the screen. After placing the brush, set this frame as a key frame. A small key should be displayed at the bottom right of the display. Advance to frame number 31 and place the brush at X, Y location 114, 16. Set this frame as a key frame. You have now set up a start position and end position for our sun. Now click on the MAKE KEY gadget to tell the program to calculate the "in-betweens". The program will place all the inbetweens in a straight line between the two key frames we defined. Click on the SHOW gadget ot verify this. The program should show the brush move from the start to the end locations defined. 57 Since we want the sun to appear in front of the sky picture, set the BACK/FRONT merge option to FRONT. To save time, the "Sun" picture uses the same palette as the "Background" picture, so set the QUICK/SMART merge option to QUICK. When the merge options have been set, activate the merge operation by clicking on the ACCEPT gadget. The program will begin merging the brush into the animation using the defined motion path. When the merge is complete, play the animation to see what the animation looks like so far. The [Esc] key or left mouse button will abort the play sequence. ADDING THE FOREGROUND We now want to place a foreground picture on top of the current animation. To do this we must first have the picture loaded into memory. Be sure no frames are selected, and click on the LOAD ILBM icon. Load the picture named "Foreground" located in the ILBMs directory of the tutorial disk. Once the program has loaded the picture, we are now ready to merge it into the animation. Again, with no frames selected, click on the MErGE icon. This will present you with the Merge requester. We want to QUICK merge the foreground picture in FRONT of ALL FRAMES of the animation. When you have set these merge options (QUICK, FRONT, and ALL FRAMES), click on the PROCEED gadget. The program will proceed with the merge operation. When it is complete take a look at the animation thus far to see exactly what you have done. ADDING TIMING INFORMATION When viewing the animation, the sun rises a bit too fast. This can be remedied by giving each frame timing information. Select all frames of the animation and click on the Frame Timing icon. When the Frame Timing Requester appears, enter a value of "4" (no "quotes") into the "Timing" string gadget, and click on the ALL gadget. This will set the timing for all selected frames to four jiffies. Click on the PROCEED gadget. Now if you play the animation the sunrise is slower. 58 ADDING COLOR EFFECTS The next operation we want to perform is the sky color fade. This will give the effect of night to day. This is done using the palette functions. Click on the Palette icon. When the Palette Requester appears, select color register 9. Color register 9 is the ninth color from the left on the first row of colored squares. This color in this requester should be a light blue. Using the slide gadgets at the top, change this color to black. Moving all the slide gadgets to reflect a value of "0" will make the color black. Do this with color registers 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13. These are the colors that are used in the background picture. We want these colors to change from black through their original colors ultimately to light blue. We will do this in two steps. First from black to the original colors, then from the original colors to light blue. With the Frame Number still at "0", click on the SPREAD gadget. Now repeatedly click on the NEXT gadget until the frame number at the bottom displays "15". Now click on any color register at the bottom of the requester. This will cause Animation Station to examine the two palettes and calculate the spread for the frames "in-between". Click on the PREV gadget several times to verify that registers 9 through 13 slowly change from black to the original colors between frames "0" and "15". Advance to frame number "31". We want the sky colors in the last frame (31) to be light blue. Change color registers 9 through 13 to RGB values of RED=0, GREEN=10, and BLUE=15. Click on the SPREAD gadget, and using the PREV or NEXT gadgets, move to frame number "15". When you have reached frame "15" click on any of the color registers at the bottom of the requester. This will cause the spread of colors to be calculated from frame "31" to frame "15". Click on the NEXT icon to show the colors slowly approaching light blue. Click on the ACCEPT gadget to write the changes to the animation in memory so that it reflects the new color palette. Now play the animation again to see how the sky changes from black when the sun is down, to light blue when the sun is in the sky. 59 FINE TUNING Notice that the sun does not remain in the sky for very long. To make the sun stay in the sky for a longer period of time, change the timing of the last frame to a value of 90 (no prompts this time. You know how). This will cause the last frame to remain on the screen for 90 jiffies or one and one half seconds. Play the animation to see what can be done with a little planning and three simple IFF files. This tutorial session is completed, however, you may want to experiment a little on your own. For instance, can you make the sun go down again in just a few steps? Tutorial Four: Working With a HAM Animation In this tutorial we will take an ordinary Hold and Modify (HAM) animation and use the Motion Blur special effect on it. We will then place a picture in the background. We will assume that you have finished the prior tutorials and are reasonably familiar with the operation of the program. Few bolded prompts will be given during the course of this tutorial. Load the animation named "ANIM2" in the "ANIMs" directory on the tutorial diskette. By playing the animation you will see that it is the word ANIM moving and rotating on the screen. THE MOTION BLUR EFFECT Select all frames of the animation using the Select All icon. Now deselect the first three frames of the animation. Click on the FX icon and increment the motion blur slider gadget 3 positions to the right by placing the mouse pointer on the far right of the slider gadget area and clicking the left mouse button 3 times. The slider gadget should move towards your mouse pointer three places. Click on the PROCEED gadget to start the Motion Blur effect. 60 This operation will take a little while so go get yourself a cup of coffee while the program works. When it is complete play the animation to see the effect that we have done. TIMING THE ANIMATION Set the timing of all the frames to 3 jiffies, then set the timing for the last frame to a value of 8. That way the word "ANIM" will stay on the screen a little while before the animation starts over. MERGING A HAM BACKGROUND Next we will place a picture in the background of the animation. First, we must load the picture. Make sure that no frames of the animation are selected and then load the picture named "Frazzle" located in the "ILBMs" directory on the tutorial diskette. After the file has been loaded, activate the Merge Requester. This requester will be slightly different than in prior tutorials. This is because the animation and picture are in Hold and Modify mode (HAM). In HAM mode you don't have the QUICK or SMART options. Instead a slider gadget is used to define the weight the program will place on the foreground and background palettes. The higher numbers favor the foreground palette and the lower numbers give preference to the background. We want to set this scroll gadget to a value of 4 since there are more colors in the background than in the foreground. We also wish to merge with ALL FRAMES and in the BACKground. The merge process will also take a little while to perform since a variation of a "smart" must always be used when working with HAM images. When the process is complete, play the animation to view the final results. These are your animations. Feel free to experiment all you want. The number of individual functions of Animation Station can be counted. The number of ways they can be used is up to you. 61 Section Five: Tips and Hints A. LOW MEMORY EDITING. Sometimes an animation is too large to load into memory. When this occurs, two options are available to allow editing of the animation. You can use the "SplitANIM" and "CombineANIM" utilities (located in the UTILs drawer of the tutorial disk), to convert the single animation into multiple smaller animations, or you can edit the animation using LOW MEMORY mode. LOW MEMORY MODE If Animation Station determines that you haven't enough memory to load a particular animation into memory, you will be asked if you wish to enter LOW MEMORY mode. When entering this mode you will be restricted in the operations you may perform. The animation itself is NOT loaded into memory, however certain information about the animation is held in memory. If Animation Station locates a storyboard file it will attempt to load it, otherwise it will automatically enter FAST mode. AVAILABLE TOOLS All simple editing will work properly, including copying, deleting, inserting, clearing, viewing, IFF save, and mirroring. If you attempt to perform an operation that is not supported in LOW MEMORY mode then you will get an error requester stating so. LIMITATIONS In low memory mode you will not be allowed to perform special effects, ANIM merges, or brush merges. You will only be allowed to perform one picture merge during your editing session. HOW IT WORKS All editing performed when in LOW MEMORY mode will be stored in memory. When you save the animation after making your changes the program will perform the edits in a "batch" mode of operation. 62 This means that the actual functions will not be performed until you save the animation. For this reason you must give a different filename for the animation when saving. Animation Station must use the original animation to create the new one. This is purely a disk based process so it is slow, but requires very little memory. B. FAST MODE/STORYBOARD MODE There are times when quick and easy identification of specific frames of the animation is not required. For instance, merging a background, flipping the entire animation on the X axis, and other global edits. In other cases, there may not be enough free memory to create a storyboard. In these cases you may prefer to work in FAST mode. FAST mode simply means that Animation Station will not create and maintain the storyboard frames. This is called FAST mode because it takes less time to perform some functions since the program needn't worry about updating the storyboard. This is most noticeable when the user performs a function that alters all frames of the animation. You can enter FAST mode by clicking on the FAST mode icon (Lightning Bolt). If Animation Station cannot locate a storyboard file during the loading process, you will be asked whether or not you wish a storyboard to be created. Clicking on Cancel will cause the program to enter FAST mode. If Animation Station finds a storyboard file for a loaded animation, it will load the animation in STORYBOARD mode. C. DEALING WITH PALETTES AND COLORS Color is a very important aspect of creating visually pleasing animations. The Amiga has a large color palette of 4096 colors, but the user is usually limited to 16 or 32 on the screen at one time. Hold and Modify (HAM) mode allows the display of up to 4096 colors on screen, but is limited to 16 true colors, all other colors are specified as offsets from the last color displayed on a scan line. Since Hold and Modify mode 63 can only modify the red, green, OR blue values of a color in this way, the color desired for a particular pixel may not be possible. Animation Station attempts to choose its colors in the most efficient fashion, but is limited to the Amiga's display. Therefore as the creator of an animation, it is up to you to choose your color palettes intelligently. If you know that you are going to merge a picture with an animation, create that picture either with the same palette or choose a palette similar to that of the animation. The program does an excellent job of color matching when performing a smart merge, but is NOT perfect. A similar palette is easier to merge than one that is completely different. Plan your animation merges prior to performing them. Make use of the Palette Requester's Calculate function to obtain color information. Also using image enhancement programs such as PIXMate (also a product of Progressive Peripherals & Software Inc., written by Justin V. McCormick) can aid in shifting color registers around, and matching palettes before the merge process. Make use of the tools available to you. Remember that planning is the key to producing an excellent animation. 64 Appendix A: Outline of Animation Station Icons Play - Plays the current animation according to the given timing information. Fast Play - Plays the resident animation ignoring any timing information and playing as fast as possible. Select All/None - Selects all frames in the animation when clicked on the right half of this icon. When clicked on the left half of the icon, de-selects all frames. Insert Frames - This icon will insert frames into the current animation. The icon is divided into two halves, the left half and the right half. Selecting the left half will insert frames before the first selected frame, while selecting the right half will insert frames after the first selected frame. Mirror - This function is used for reversing the order of frames. The first selected frame will be swapped with the last selected frame and so on. Gray Scale - Converts the selected frames of a non hold and modify animation to gray scale. 65 Append at End - This function will append the current external picture to the end of the current animation. Color Palette - Activates the Palette Requester. Special Effects - This is really many functions in one. Selecting this icon will bring up a request for effects information. You may select what type of effects you wish to perform. The effects are: flipping the animation about the X or Y axis, scrolling frames in or out in any direction, scaling the image by one half or one fourth, mosaic tiling and motion blur synthesis. Brush Move - This function is used to define a motion path for external brushes to be used in merge operations. Timing - Activates the Frame Timing requester, used to enter timing information for the animation. You can specify frame timing, and sound synchronization with this requester. Grab Brush - This function is used to grab a brush from any frame in the animation. Crop - This function can be used to blank out unwanted portions of a frame or group of frames. 66 Fast Mode - Toggles the user between fast mode and storyboard mode. In fast mode the program isn't required to do extra calculations necessary to update the storyboard. SAVE ILBM - This function is used to save a frame or group of frames as IFF ILBM format pictures for use in other programs. LOAD ILBM - This function is used to load an IFF ILBM picture into temporary storage or into a frame or group of frames in the animation. After loading a picture with this function the picture becomes your current external picture for use with other functions. SAVE ANIM - This function will save the selected frames as a new animation on disk. The SAVE process also gives you the opportunity to convert the animation to a different resolution. LOAD ANIM - This will load an animation into memory. If an animation is already loaded into memory then the program will present the user with merge options. The user can overlay, underlay, precede or append to the current animation. COPY - This activates the COPY command. Once the COPY process is complete, the icon will be de-selected. 67 MOVE - This activates the MOVE function. Once the Move process is complete, the icon will be de-selected. VIEW - This icon is used to view selected frames. The left mouse button is used to advance to the next selected frame while the [ESC] or [SPACE] keys abort the operation. MERGE - This function will merge your current external picture into the background or foreground of the current animation. UNDO - This will undo the last operation that was performed. DISK INFO - Displays information about the amount of storage space required for the entire animation, or selected frames of the animation. Available storage space on the currently selected AmigaDOS device is also displayed. Clear Frames - This function will erase the contents of all the selected frames, leaving the blanked frames in the animation. Delete - (Trashcan) Removes selected frames completely from the animation. 68 Appendix B - Animation Station Custom Configuration A file named "Station.CONFIG" is located on the Animation Station release disk. This file contains information for the program. This information can be altered by the user to customize his/her Animation Station default settings. To modify this file, use the text editor of your choice. If you are familiar with the Workbench "Ed" program, you can simply double click on the "Edit-CONFIG" icon located on the release disk. The file has a format that MUST be adhered to. If the file format is improper then defaults set in the file will be ignored upon execution of the program. This file can reside either in the "S:" directory or the current directory when the program is executed. If this file is NOT found, then the system will set its own defaults. The file format is as follows. KEYWORD1 = "string" [RETURN] KEYWORD2 = "string" [RETURN] The keywords and their string definitions are listed below. The order in which these keywords appear makes no difference. The quotes around the string are required, as well as the equals "=" sign. [RETURN] means that each line MUST be followed by a carriage return. NOTE: nothing is case sensitive. The keywords and their strings are. ANIM = "default animation directory" The directory that is default when you are selecting an animation to load or save. Example: ANIM = "AStation:Anims" ILBM = "default picture directory" The directory that is default when you are selecting a IFF ILBM picture. Example: ILBM = "AStation:ILBMs" 69 SOUND = "default sound directory" The directory that is default when you are selecting a digitized sound. Example: SOUND = "AStation:SNDs" UNDO = "where to save undo buffers" This can be "RAM:" if you have plenty of spare memory. It is recommended that the UNDO buffers be assigned to a disk drive to avoid low memory situations. Example: UNDO = "DH0:AStation/Temp" DATA = "where to look for 'Station.DATA'" Directory to search for "Station.DATA" in addition to the current directory. Example: DATA = "DH0:Data" ANIMTool = "DefaultTool for animation icons" This is your animation viewing program. Example: AStation:Utils/View" ILBMTool = "DefaultTool for picture icons" This is your picture viewing program. Example: AStation:Utils/View" UNDOBuffer = "YES" or "NO" Tells the program whether or not to save its undo buffers. Example: UNDOBuffer = "Yes" CLOSEWBENCH = "YES" or "NO" Tells the program whether it should attempt to close the Workbench screen. It will only succeed if no other program is using the Workbench screen. This includes a CLI or Shell window. Example: CLOSEWBENCH = "No" 70 WRITEICONS = "YES" or "NO" Tells the program whether or not it should write icon files (.info) for files that it creates. Example: WRITEICONS = "Yes" UNDOPROMPT = "YES" or "NO" Tells the program whether it should prompt the user for a location for its undo buffers on execution. Example: UNDOPROMPT = "No" YESNOPROMPT = "YES" or "NO" Tells the program whether or not it should ask you if it should overwrite or delete certain parts of the animation. For example, when you delete frames from the animation, should it ask you if you are sure that you want to delete the selected frames? Example: YESNOPROMPT = "Yes" FADE = "0, or 1, or 2..." Controls the fade delay when the program switches from screen to screen. This control is purely for aesthetics and does not enhance the performance of Animation Station. Setting this option to "0" will cause Animation Station to flip from screen to screen with no fade. Settings greater than "0" will cause a fade of 1/60 second per increment. Although legal, settings greater then "2" are not recommended due to the excessive wait this will cause. Example: FADE = "1" 71 Appendix C: File Formats The ANIM Format WHAT IS THE ANIM FORMAT? The ANIM format is an Interchange File Format (IFF), that allows an animation to be stored in a compressed form. This compressed format allows for many frames to be stored on disk and in memory. The ANIM format stores each frame as a difference from the last. This is the Amiga standard format for animation. Unfortunately, when somebody yells "standard", someone else always yells "Not good enough!". For that reason some people have opted not to use the standard, feeling that they can do better. This is good in the respect that better formats may be created, but bad in that compatibility with other programs is nonexistent. This last point is devastating to you, the user. The Amiga community seems to be the best in the business for sticking to a standard, maybe it will start a trend. MOST people have come around and started using the ANIM standard in their programs or at least support it as well as their own. And everyone uses the IFF Interleave BitMap (ILBM) picture format. This gives a great flexibility to the user, as he/she gets to choose where they want to create their pictures or animations. WHAT ARE IT'S LIMITATIONS? The ANIM format has some limitations that you should be aware of. These are problems that are inherent in the design of the ANIM format and limitations of the Amiga computer. First of all since the ANIM format is implemented on a computer, it is only as fast as that computer. Those who have 68020 or 68030 processors will find that animations will play at 2 to 3 times faster than that of a standard Amiga with a 68000 processor. 72 Secondly, because animations are stored as differences (deltas) from frame to frame, animations with large differences (full screen changes), do NOT lend themselves well to the ANIM format. Thirdly, animations require MEMORY. The longer and more complicated an animation is, the more memory it will require. Special steps have been taken with Animation Station to reduce the memory required to edit these animations, but ultimately, those who wish to create long and complicated animations, will require large amounts of memory. ANIMATION STATION ".AUDIO" FILE FORMAT Animation Station creates ".Audio" files for animations when the user has defined sounds to be played during the animation. This audio file is written in human readable form so that a user can create his own if he desires. Below is a description of the file format that is expected by Animation Station. If the format is not proper, you will get undeterminable results. Audio files are supported by Animation Station and are the same format as Sculpt Movie format audio files. Animation Station supports IFF 8SVX type sounds, as well as Future Sound files. The format of the Audio file is as follows. The name of the audio file is based on the name of its animation, adding the suffix ".audio". For instance, if the name of the animation is "George", then the name of the audio file will be "George.audio". The Picture/Animation display utility included with this package called "View", will look for this audio file when it plays the animation. 73 The audio file format is as follows: SOUNDPATH0 Sound file SOUNDPATH1 Sound file ... list all desired sounds * the SPLAT denotes end of sound list 1 Number of foreground sounds 00L50 0 = frame to start sound 0 = sound to use from above list L = Left channel 50 = volume (0=64) 1 Number of foreground sounds 01R64 0 = frame to start sound 1 = sound to use from above list R = Right channel 64 = volume (0-64) Note: The comments at the right are NOT supported! They are only shown here to aid in the understanding of the file format. Background sounds start at the given frame number and repeat until the animation is stopped. Foreground sounds start at the given frame and play ONCE. Remember, the Amiga has only four audio channels, two right and two left, so you can only have four sounds playing at one time. These four sounds may be any combination of background and foreground sounds, but only two sounds can be played per channel. For instance, Two background sounds are currently playing (consistently), one on the right channel and the other on the left channel. Only two additional sounds may be started (foreground or background). One must be played on the right channel and the other must be played on the left channel. If a foreground sound is started at frame one, you will NOT be able to sue that channel until that sound is complete. If another sound is started (on that channel). View will attempt to abort the currently playing sound. This attempt is always successful. 74 Appendix D: Glossary of Terms The following list of terms are given as a reference for those who may be confused by the wording used in this manual. They are words that are used throughout the manual and should be fully understood by the reader. If you feel comfortable with these words feel free to skip this section. For those who do NOT feel comfortable with them, please read the section to become familiar with the meanings of the words as they pertain to this documentation. ANIM The specific file format that animations are saved, and read by Animation Station. This word is often used to refer to an animation. Animation The actual sequence of pictures that is shown in succession to give the illustration of motion. Brush An IFF ILBM picture created within Animation Station or with another program that is smaller than the current screen size. Brushes can be overlaid or underlain into the animation in various locations on the screen. Buffer A buffer is a place to store needed data. When Animation Station performs an operation, it can optionally save an undo buffer. The date in this buffer is used to restore the animation to the same state as before the given operation. Crop The term cropping is used to describe the erasure of part of an image outside a given rectangle. All pixels outside the rectangle will become background color. Reverse cropping is the process of erasing part of an image inside a given rectangle. Dragging This term is used to mean locating the mouse cursor over a given spot, and pressing down on the left mouse button. Then moving the mouse cursor to a new location and releasing the left mouse button. 75 External This term is used in Animation Station to refer to pictures that are loaded but are NOT part of the current animation. You may have only one external picture loaded at any time. This external picture can be used in various merge effects within Animation Station. Frame A particular picture of an animation. All animations are groups of pictures. Each picture of the animation is referred to as a frame. Gadget A Gadget is a visual representation of a specific task. They are used in many cases instead of words for quicker recognition and recall. They are often referred to as icons or images. Sometimes they are words on the screen that can be selected by the mouse. Icon An icon is a visual representation of a specific task. They are used in many cases instead of words for quicker recognition and recall. To perform the operation that a given icon represents, place the mouse cursor over the icon and press the left mouse button. Icons are also referred to as gadgets. IFF Stands for Interchange File Format. It is the format in which all pictures and animations are saved and read by Animation Station. There are different types of IFF files including ANIM, ILBM, and 8SVX. ILBM The specific file format that pictures are saved and read by Animation Station. This word is often used to refer to to a picture. Jiffy A jiffy is a period of time just like a second or minute is a period of time. It is used to refer to one vertical cycle of the Amiga video display. This is exactly 1/60th of a second. Therefore 60 jiffies is 1 second. Overlay The process of placing one picture on top of another. In this process color number 0 of the top picture is considered to be transparent. 76 Palette Every frame of an animation has its own colors. These colors are referred to as its palette. Quick In Animation Station you will sometimes have the option between SMART and QUICK. This will occur when you are attempting to overlay or underlay two pictures or animations. Selecting QUICK will tell the program to ignore the color information. See Smart. Select This is the process of placing the mouse cursor over an icon or other given location and pressing the left mouse button. The left mouse button is referred to as the "Select Button". Some things remain selected after you select them. These items will become highlighted in some way to show that they are selected. To deselect them simply select them again. Smart In Animation Station you will sometimes have the option between SMART and QUICK. This will occur when you are attempting to overlay or underlay two pictures or animations. Selecting smart will tell the program to attempt to fix any color differences between the two pictures. See Quick. Stack An AmigaDOS command used to reset or display the stack size in bytes. Storyboard A storyboard is a small visual representation of the real thing. Storyboards are used as a visual aid in Animation Station when editing an animation. Underlay The process of placing one picture under another. In this process, color number 0 of the top picture is considered to be transparent. 8SVX The specific file format that digitized sounds are read by Animation Station. 77 Appendix E - Utilities The "AStation" disk contains a drawer called "UTILs". Four utilities are contained within this drawer. They are: VIEW Allows you to view Opcode 5 & 6 animations or ILBM picture files. This utility is copyrighted, but has been released into the public domain so that you may distribute it along with your animations. Please read the "View" documentation file located in the "UTILs" drawer on the program disk. BUILDANIM Allows you to build an animation from several discrete IFF picture files. Building an animation frame by frame within Animation Station can be time consuming. This utility speeds the process by using a "batch processing" approach. SPLITANIM Allows you to split a large animation file into two playable animation files. For those who wish to edit an animation too large for the available memory, without using "Low Memory Mode". After editing, the animations can be re-combined using "CombineAnim". COMBINEANIM Allows you to combine two animations into one larger animation. This utility performs it's function on disk rather than in RAM, so large animations may be created on a system with limited memory. ANIMINFO Allows you to quickly identify animation type, screen format, file size, and number of frames in the animation. This information is useful when manipulating animations outside of Animation Station. This utility will also identify pre-Opcode 5 animations. 78 DISCLAIMER No warranty is made with respect to Animation Station software, its quality or performance. Any and all warranties for merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose are expressly excluded. In no event shall Progressive Peripherals & Software, Inc. be liable or responsible to the purchases or any other person or entity for direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages, including but not limited to interruption of service and loss of business or anticipatory profits, resulting from any defect in or misunderstanding of the software or its documentation, even if Progressive Peripherals & Software, Inc. has been advised of the possibility of such damages. The warranty and remedies set forth above are exclusive and in lieu of all others, oral and written, expressed or implied. 79 End.