A community project

[wizard509]

I have been trying to make an animated kaleidoscope image with very little success so far (most have been dismal failures). So I was thinking maybe we could put our heads together and figure out how to do one using only Xara. The image below is a photo I took and stitched together then cropped in on it and using the photo tools enhansed it some. I hope it will be suitable.
I was thinking we should use this as a common image and post our results and how we did it.



This is one of very limited success but not what I was looking for and only attaching it so you can see that I have been indeed working on the problem.



tractor flash kaleidoscope failure.swf

What I had tried to do was Making two circular shapes consisting if triangular shapes rotating in opposite directions on top of the photo, obviousely that didn't work very well.

[guyke]

I gave it a go Larry. What do you think ?

kaleidoscoop tractor animatie.swf

What I did was a rather repetitive thing - I work with XDP7 and made 5 rings (2 circles - subtract shapes). I then made a clipview of the picture with each of these rings.
In the page options (general tab) i set the angle constraint to 10. Select middle circle, middle ring and outer ring and make 36 copies turning clockwise. Select the other two rings and make 36 copies anticlockwise.
Start an animation, make 37 frames with the picture on it.
Then flip back and forth between design and animation : select the 5 visible rings and cut to clipboard, in animation paste in place. Next frame, same procedure until you exhausted all the frames and all the copies of the circles
Set speed to 0.1 sec for the animation and 2 seconds for frame 1.

[ShapeShifter]

Well I'm not about to animated this, basically I sliced off a corner at 60 degrees and well, used it to create a kaleidoscope pattern,

[wizard509]

Pretty cool and great attempt Guy but still not what I'm looking for.

ShapeShifter beautiful kaleidoscope image. Thanks,
May I take that image and work with it some?

This is my latest failure. I didn't take it far enough though and it jumps badly. This isn't what I'm looking for either.

anim 4 not smooth.swf

This had 3 layers with a circular transparency. I made a bitmap copies of each so xara flash wouldn't complain and rotated the top two opposite to each other. The bottom layer which is causing the most obvious jump I didn't rotate enough times was the entire image rotated the same direction as the top fan shape filled image.

Here are some real good ones. They were all done by fence post using gimp.

http://fence-post.deviantart.com/art...ombo-147803977

http://www.gimpdome.com/scripts-n-pl...em39olk2j4buq1

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=...n-AoqjsQLfjrkx

[Antspants]

I am watching this thread with interest but must admit that I'm not really sure what kind of thing you are after. I had a quick browse yesterday and found the exact same sites as those you have posted.

I need a better understanding of what exactly a kaleidoscope effect is, I'll research it.

Does it mean something has to 'rotate' to get the effect or do things kinda swirl in and out from different angles?

Can the effect be acheived by keeping the image static but using over-layers of different shapes/transparrency to create the illusion?

[wizard509]

I am watching this thread with interest but must admit that I'm not really sure what kind of thing you are after. I had a quick browse yesterday and found the exact same sites as those you have posted.

I need a better understanding of what exactly a kaleidoscope effect is, I'll research it.

Does it mean something has to 'rotate' to get the effect or do things kinda swirl in and out from different angles?

Can the effect be acheived by keeping the image static but using over-layers of different shapes/transparrency to create the illusion?

Something like those done by fence post is what I'm after. Like what you would see when looking through a real kaleidoscope. I have been trying to do that gimp tutorial to see how that would look, but, I can't get it to work. I always get an error. How we go about this I don't know, that's why I have posted my failures and why this is a community project to see if all of us that are interested could get close to the effect shown in the url's I posted. I could post some of the animations I found but I don't want to get in trouble for doing that. I guess I'll go to the source and ask for permission. Stay tuned.

[ShapeShifter]

ShapeShifter beautiful kaleidoscope image. Thanks,
May I take that image and work with it some?

Of course, you can even have the .xar

Mehdi has a free plugin that runs in Xara.

Rather more satisfying to try this yourself though, isn't it?

[ODdOnLifeItself]

Hello Larry,

I've thought about this quite a bit, and I can't think of any way that you'd be able to do this strictly in Xara. The places where the individual pieces come together (the axis of reflection) has to be like a black hole...the pixels that hit this line need to disappear. As long as any of the pieces have priority (ie. are higher either in stack or in layers), they will be on top. How will you make the uppermost piece "stop" when it hits the axis of reflection? Are there active layer masks that can exist for each layer? It seems this would be necessary in order to make it work. I would like to be proven wrong, though!

It seems like a really cool effect.

It's late here, and I didn't have much time, but is the following the basic look that you are after?

http://www.jamesalexander.de/Kaleido.html

Peace

James

[wizard509]

Here is my latest. Back to using transparencies. At the moment this is the best I can do.
I know I don't have a good starting and ending place and it looks like it rewinds but otherwise it seems ok (to me at least). What do you think?

Version unknown.swf

[Hwy101]

Maybe we need a good definition (this one from Princeton):

Noun

S: (n) kaleidoscope (a complex pattern of constantly changing colors and shapes)
S: (n) kaleidoscope (an optical toy in a tube; it produces symmetrical patterns as bits of colored glass are reflected by mirrors)

Pix from Google