Forum: Animation


Subject: Darth_Logice's Animation Log Vol.3

Darth_Logice opened this issue on Dec 21, 1999 ยท 5 posts


Dr Zik posted Wed, 22 December 1999 at 10:05 AM

Hi Folks! Darth, I have some suggestions that might help, but I should caution you that they will create more work for you. In essence, create your animation as a series of stills (which is what animation is anyway). That way you can control the exact positioning of the conforming figures in each image. Move each figure a tad in each new scene, render out the scene as a .bmp or .tif (or .pct if you're on a Mac) and repeat the operation until you have a complete series on frozen movements. Save all your stills to a single folder, open the folder in Premiere or Avid Cinema, and create your animation there. You'll have to decide what kind of motion speed you'll want--but short clips can be convincing even at playback speeds as slow as 10 frames/sec. If you don't have movie creation/editing software (which you absolutely must have if you're serious about computer animation), there's lots of shareware floating around that allows you to batch render sequenced or numbered stills into an .AVI or .QT movie file. My favorite is one for the Mac called MovieMaker. BTW: if you're going to do convincing animations with this method, you should also have an image-editing program like Photoshop, Painter or PSP. You'll need to apply a slight motion blur to each still image before you process them as a movie. In real life the human eye sees a series a blurred stills that the brain processes into a vision of continuous motion. I'm not a champion animator, but these techniques has worked for me. I Hope they help. Peter (Dr Zik)