R.A.V.E. Animation

**sallybode** · 15 May 2006, 03:43 AM

Today is the first day I've tried to see what can be done with R.A.V.E.. The fireworks aren't really difficult, mostly I used a dash line pattern and varied widths. The animation is with the use of a timeline and keyframes.

**sallybode** · 15 May 2006, 03:52 AM

This was actually the first attempt.

**sallybode** · 15 May 2006, 05:28 AM

Somewhere in a galaxy far, far away, planets look like this but not here.

**Grafixman** · 15 May 2006, 08:34 AM

Hmm, I haven't really explored RAVE. It keeps crashing on me, but making simple gif animations is probably worth the try. Great animations, Sally. Did you notice any improvements from previous versions? I'm still hanging on to 11. I'm too cheap, I know. But I only use Draw's simple functions, anyway.

**sallybode** · 15 May 2006, 03:13 PM

Yeah, R.A.V.E. can crash if you are doing things it doesn't understand. If you stick with it to figure out what those are, you learn how to use it, same with DRAW. When I started to learn DRAW I was trying to force it to behave like Illustrator and using the tools as if it were Illustrator. It crashed a lot. Once I figured out that it crashed when I did .... and stopped doing that and did my work like DRAW thinks, I rarely have a crash, not even once a month. That's a whole lot better.

When I go back to 9 and use that for something, and 9 was what alwasys crashed for me, it doesn't crash either. So I figure, I found out how to use it and I was the main reason it was crashing.

I figured out that you can't change the size of the animation in mid-stream, better to start over. I don't have 11, but there is a like an Object Manager next to the timeline which is also a stacking order, and dragging what you need in front of other items works where as Shift-Page Up or Ctrl-Page Up can lead to a crash.

Selecting text on a path in key frames was a problem as I was finding it nearly impossible to get the red node handle for moving the text. I kept ending up with it telling me I couldn't make a blend or a contour and I wasn't even selecting that. I found out that in order to get that red edit handle I have to start from the pick tool, go to node edit, then select the text tool, then back to the pick tool and there is that elusive little edit handle and no crash.

The part I had the hardest time was creating the orbits. How I finally stumbled on the orbit, is not clear to me. As you can't have more than a start and an end in the timeline and if they aren't just right over each other, it doesn't work, and if you have a third, then the planets reverse direction. Good for a Kiwi animation, however with building her vehicles.

There are definitely cool things you can do, but the .swf export, the height and width seems to be a third smaller than the same animation saved as .gif. And if you change the background color from its original, you can get a white outline on exporting .gif.

There really aren't many tutorials to teach you what to do. But there are several files you can download and then pick them apart. I don't know if they will work in 11, since they are written for 12. I found them by going Corel Draw 12 support files in Google. They are the ones which the Steve Bain big Corel Draw 12 book has a web site for.

**Grafixman** · 16 May 2006, 01:20 PM

I will try to remember those tips, Sally. I must admit I'm sometimes tempted to uninstall RAVE from my pc, being fickle as it is right now. It's really not an alternative to Flash, or even Swift. I wonder what they were thinking when they thought of making it in the first place. I mean, tweaking and adding a timeline to Draw would not automatically make it an animation software. It's not as if Draw is a fast and sleek software like Xara. It is capable, but it's huge and slows down painfully when it's processing complex drawings and large amount of bitmaps. They should've tried the product more thoroughly before releasing it to the market, really...

**sallybode** · 16 May 2006, 03:22 PM

On the one hand you tell me the animations I did were good, on the other, you tell me that R.A.V.E. isn't a good enough program to even exist. Well, Corel agreed with you and dropped it from their package.

As far as doing animation on a timeline, I find it interesting, it is more like video editing. And the timeline thing makes true tweeing of vector items possible. I've tried tweening in PI's Gif Animator and it outputs were rather blurry. So I put it aside to see what else I could do.

Whereas R.A.V.E. has its limitations, so does Gif Animator and you used it alot irregardless, you have accepted the limitations and then function within those perameters. Same with Xara, it can't do everything either and its ability to turn our animations is strained though I have done it. As far as crashes go, nearly every time I fire up Xara Xtreme, it has crashed on me. I was doing the microphone challlenge and made the mic about three times. Crashed every single one of them irretreivably. I decided if I'd try again, I'd do the wireframe in DRAW and just do the rendering in Xara, but just didn't have the heart after all those crashes. Xara is the only program I use that crashes consistently. Usually when I figure out what I am doing, crashes go away. Well, I would say I know how to use Xara. But I would rather use X1 and not Xtreme unless I am planning on using plugins.

R.A.V.E. can do text animations quite well. And using it for what it is good for is what all software is about.

**Grafixman** · 16 May 2006, 04:39 PM

They are good animations, Sally.

Plus the fact that you managed to get RAVE to work is the other surprise. I just tried to do a simple rolling wheel on a rollercoaster and it crashed on me, again...

. I made a symbol of a rotating wheel, incorporated that symbol into a rollercoaster carriage, and when I try to move the carriage along a path, boom! I'm really vexed by this program...
Gif Animator is a raster program. Rotations and scaling would blur the objects, but that is to be expected. That is why it's no match for vector graphics like Flash (or a properly working RAVE).
I agree on the point that there are limitations on all programs, and we have to learn to adapt to them. But the conditions where RAVE hangs are really too random for me...

**sallybode** · 17 May 2006, 01:46 AM

Well, we have different versions, perhaps they fixed alot of the headaches that came with 11.

If anyone could figure it out, you could if it were possible.