The February 2012 Tutorial Discussion

[stygg2003]

Well Gary I learnt a lot from the bouncing ball tut. because I've never done an animation before, so I will try to expand on what you said and shown in the tut. on something of my own, says he hesitantly , I've uploaded the Xara file so anyone can view in what ever browser they use and give me some feedback on what could have been done better

Stygg

[Gare]

Hey there, stygg—

You've never done an animation before, eh?

Well, I'd say you sure know how to follow my lead and you reproduced my own bouncing ball just about flawlessly. I think mine has less energy (like I myself do), but I never mentioned the exact height for the apogee of the ball, so let me revise and tell you that you did the tutorial perfectly, five stars, man.

Aside from taking this tutorial's result to the conclusion I showed of putting it in a composite scene (like with After Effects), you can do variations on the bounce cycle, too, as I think you're alluding to in the future?

Why does it have to be a ball? Wouldn't it be funnier to do a bouncing anvil, or a bouncing chicken? Or a chair?

Consider this also: you could do an animation cycle by introducing the ball in frame 2 at stage left, and not only does it bounce up and down, but it also bounces left to right, and finally off stage right, only to reappear again at left as the cycle repeats.

I believe anyone can get at least four or five interesting animation cycles out of this simple cartoon bounce: you know, anyone who downloaded Bryce from an earlier post here that Barbara made Download it free until Feb. 29th!, you could render a new background for the ball.

I encourage everyone who suffers through my 10 minute tutorial to vary the elements. Mix it up: the animation itself is the star of what you learn and the shapes are only players.

I think Shakespeare said that.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I'm going to let this month simmer with members for a while. I'm unsure whether our membership prefers text-based tutorials, or videos, because Frances' fractal tutorial is drawing a lot of positive response this month, as it should.

If you'd like me to toss in a Gary Priester-style tutorial three or four times a year, please let me know. My job is to provide you with what you want and need to know, and not for me to do whatever interests me myself!

My Best,

Gary

[handrawn]

if its possible with xara flash implementation, its good to vary the timing of the cycle and introduce squish - the rate of shape deformity and the rate of change of velocity [acceleration] should not be constant throughout the motion path, that's not what happens in nature - lots of stuff out in google about animation timing, including for bouncing balls - see attached - note the slowing down effect due to gravity and the effect acceleration/deacceleration has on distorting the shape...

[stygg2003]

Thank you for your comments Gary and I will try a a mix as you suggest, a ball, anvil whatever. With regards to your question Videos or text tuts. I personally like them both, video because you can actually see what is being done and the text tuts. because you can easily refer to them. I have a folder that's falling over wiyh G.P's tuts. and besides, I think you would present a really good text tut. judgeing by the quality of your vids. so as you have just said yourself to me, mix it up!

Stygg

[Gare]

Thanks for the suggestions and contributions, folks.

handrawn's reference for bouncing is a good one. And yes, you can very speed in a Flash animation, although please let me point out that Xara's animation engine might be Flash, but its output can be anything you like, AVI, GIF, or SWF, so don't immediately think that your presentation is constrained to a Flash animation; it's not.

Now if you want to get tricky and fool your audience for a moment or two, create an animation that cycles twice, in other words you put two cycles in the animation and then time the second one a little more slowly.

So that when the ball goes through a bounce cycle, once it's fast and the second time it's slow. Or the second time the ball lands in a slightly different place than the first time. The Shockwave standard is pretty tolerant about the number of unique key frames you have in an animation: 5 or 10 won't significantly impact on the saved file size.

handrawn, does this touch on what you're showing? The random quality?

There are a lot of things you can do, based on a simple motion that cycles. Yes, very the speed, the destination, if you want to get bizarre, change the colour of the ball over time!

The key to keeping your audience's attention is to make your animation cycle as visually interesting as possible, because the point is to build something that has a 5 second cycle, but keeps your audience watching for 15 seconds.

Attached is one of the most ambitious SWF animations I was ever stupid enough to create. I think there are four complete drawings in the file, but I think many people would watch is for several seconds. Again, this is a cycle: the rocking horse goes forward, to the center, back and then center again.

-g-

[wizard509]

I think the rocking horse is great Gare, might be a little fast but nonetheless very nice. I am looking forward to doing the bouncing ball tutorial, but so far I've had not time to do it. I will continue to follow this thread with interest. Handrawn brings up an interesting point and I am looking forward to seeing if there is an answer, but as far as I know it isn't possible at least not without much additional work and frames.

[handrawn]

sorry gary - the only animation I have personal hands on experience with [leaving aside animated gifs ] is cell based, when I say 'flash' what I meant was 'tweening' in the flash sense..

[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-

[Gare]

I think the rocking horse is great Gare, might be a little fast but nonetheless very nice. I am looking forward to doing the bouncing ball tutorial, but so far I've had not time to do it. I will continue to follow this thread with interest. Handrawn brings up an interesting point and I am looking forward to seeing if there is an answer, but as far as I know it isn't possible at least not without much additional work and frames.

Ah! Here's something I failed to touch upon: when you do an animation these days, you have to consider your target output. There was a time when a cartoon was 24 frames per second, but no anymore. The rocking horse is probably too fast because you have a good internet connection, wizard, and that's something a content creator cannot anticipate or really cope with, except for using something other than Flash.

AVI, QuickTime, Mpeg-4 are all frame-dependent so what you film is what you get. I think I had the rocking horse set up to .1 seconds per frame, because at the time I created it, much of the audience for it had a 1 or 1.5 transfer speed, compared to an easy 2 today.

I guess that's why it's important to always keep your resource files for animation, for when technology changes.

-g

[handrawn]

zeb makes all his drawings in xara and animates them in ToonBoom AFAIK - I like toonboom; I like TVPaint too [which is non-vector] but can't afford it

anyways - thanks for the info Gary, I just thought I'd throw in the example 'cos timing makes or breaks animation.... hopefully it will give others ideas....