V i r t u a l   M o v e m e n t

                                 By Lee Bamber


Always keen to share new found talent within the deepest reaches of that big
cloud of dust that is my brain, an idea to spur the imagination of thousands
of virtual people.

This month, October 1994, I and the collective that is Digital Ninja aquired
a rather nifty piece of hardware called a Video Digitiser.   It's called the
Vidi-Amiga(12) and I payed £80 for it.  (Yes, I know it's cheaper mail order
but I'm not very patient).  What it does is take an image from a video input
and converts it to an image the computer can  use  (typically an IFF file!).
My Digitiser supports a large array of graphic modes including 256 colour  &
even HAM8(lots of colours...trust me).  These images can be messed about and
used in my games, at least, that's the idea I had when I bought it.

How strange that no-one has really made an attempt to use digitised graphics
in PD, I thought?  You can pick up a digitiser for less than fifty quid?   I
wonder why?  You won't be suprised that I soon found out why.   Essentially,
the digitiser does it's job well.   I have a small directory of images, both
original and insanely altered versions.    Cut out the bits you want and put
them in your games and they look AWFUL!  It's bad enough looking at the grey
scale images over coloured backdrops, but the edges are so obvious, you just
cringe at the crude misplaced spectacle.

So what now.  Do what I suppose everyone else did and left it for the  funny
grab now and again, until it gathers dust in some corner?  Well, no.   I  do
not have much money and £80 represents about 3-4 months royalties, so a week
into playing with it,  I fine tuned my methods until I got something usable.

So what's this article about (apart from Lee endulging his new purchase)?  I
have drummed up a neat way of making your digitised characters move fluidly.

NOTE: Did I forget to mention I have access to a camcorder.  Just bought the
summer last.  I was going to use a £40 security camera (b/w),  but never got
round to it, when my parents came home one day with the damn thing.  After a
week of novelty camera tricks and film-making, it went in the case  and  was
forgotten by all, bar me.

I tried outside shots, still life, the lot.  Eventually, I found myself with
a recently gutted spare room, three spot lights,  a blank wall and darkness.
With the help of a brother, an uncle and a few friends,  we tried some grabs
of actual movement.  The Vidi-Amiga has a continuous grab function which got
a string of frames with an action being performed.   When  we  got  them  to
DPaint, cut them up, saved them as images and animated  them  in  AMOS,  the
graphics looked crude (like I said).

One solution to the very disjointed animation was to totally  dispense  with
the hassle of grabbing all the individual frames of animation and have  just
two.  A starting anim, and a finishing animation.  Using the marvelous  DP4,
six morphed frames where generated from the two sources.  That's six  frames
showing the image morph from one image to the other.   And why?   Well,  the
main problem with digitised graphics is they look VERY real.  They look  too
real for most peoples eyes.  If the background doesn't reflect the same rate
of detail, it looks wrong.  And it's not sensible to have  real  background,
shadows, reflections, other subtle animations and all the things  you  would
for example find on a TV screen.   Not in real-time anyway (least, not yet).
So what this morph process does is make the character movement look smoother
than any hand-drawn image, and brings it in line with what you're expecting.
Real movement.  The final morphed animation is very very smooth and  totally
beleivable.  As long as the two images are not too different, and  you  make
sure the two grabbed images are the same size (very important),  the  output
is very useful.

I've supplied a small demonstration brush which you can load into any DPaint
that supports animation.   Just set up an animation with six frames and then
load in the anim-brush, plot them into the six respective frames and play it
using the  '6' key (Ping-pong gives you the best idea behind the technique).

Maybe my topic is rather specific, but even when  I  had  an  A500  with  no
second drive, I knew I would be getting myself a digitiser and  a  means  to
grin into my computer one day.  Maybe now isn't the time to use this article
but it gives you something to look forward to.   Or warns you against making
more work for yourself.

I forsee I'll be in DPaint just as long as I was when I was hand-drawing  my
images.  Not to draw the stuff, but correcting it! The digitiser is great in
snapping a picture of your favourate TV show, but using it for  game  images
is going to be tough.   If I know me,  I'll have this digitising lark sussed
in no time.  And then you better prepare yourself for an onslaught of rather
uncomfortably real graphics, hitting your screen.

               Prepare Yourself, Now The Ninja Can Grab!