The February 2012 Tutorial Discussion

[Gare]

Okay, to dis-ambiguate here , the tweening Xara's animation engine performs is independent of the duration something is onscreen, which is not straightforward, but your illustration of bouncing spheres is certainly do-able, handrawn.

• If you want the ball in the tutorial example, to suspend longer at its apogee (shades of Warner Brothers characters lingering after they've run off a cliff!), you'd assign a longer duration to this frame by double-clicking its duration on the Animation Gallery and then entering a new value in Properties.

• If you want a ball to exhibit more characteristics within a certain duration, you create more keyframes at probably very short intervals. By doing this, you can accomplish subtle rolling effects for the ball (understanding that this is 2D animation and there are perspective things that are wicked hard to accomplish).

I worked for Henry Selick back in college (Henry directed Coraline in 2009), and this guy used to keep cue sheets and all timings in his head! If he wanted to slow down action in the good old analog way, he'd hand me two keyframe cells and tell me to put 40 frames in between, for example.

So I guess it's not all that different from traditional animation, this Xara animation stuff, except you don't have to pay a keyframer, and you don't get the sort of quality, usually, that we used to see in animation's Golden Age.

I think one of our members who runs Zebbtunes and has a demo reel up on YouTube has got this animation stuff nailed, and I admire his talent and the reality that he's keeping animation alive.

It's not all Shrek

-g-