Animation in Xara

[dcahall]

I must been doing something wrong. When I get to step 6 on page 5 the program "blows up". I just updated to version 8.1.2 today but I had the same problem yesterday before I undated. I have removed all previous versions of PGD so there would be no conflict with anything old.

Hope someone can give me so idea of what I am doing wrong. Is there any reason I could not just stop at the end of page 4 (looks pretty good to me at that point).

I also have another question. Could this technique be used to create an animation that made the flag look like it is waving?

[Gare]

Hi dcahall—

I think one other member had a problem running the Displacement Live Effect. No, there's no obvious reason why it would "blow up" on you.

Suggestion? It might be your video driver version and/or Open GL.

Do other Live Effects cause the same problem?

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Your second question is a good one. No, I'd say the displacement effect cannot be used to make a flag waving, only because to animate something, you need to create change across a timeline. Xara offers GIF, AVI, and SWF export for video, and the animation itself would need to be a change in vector path colors, position, rotation, scale or something similar for specific durations of time.

I'd find this unacceptable as a real animation, but what you could do is create two different displaced flags as bitmaps, and then fade one out and the other in along, say 5 seconds. You could also change a Mould surrounding a flag group of objects, but Xara will not keyframe this sort of change, so the resulting animation will look uneven and choppy.

Xara is limited to very specific, basic types of animation.

At present!

My Best,

Gary

[dcahall]

As I said, everything worked fine until I got to page 5. I have not used any other effects. It was just wehn I tried the Ctrl-Shift-C with the new bitmap that it fails. I have tried several times and it always fails at the same point.

I did create a waving flag with some other Xara techniques but it is on another computer. I will post it when I am on the other computer.

[dcahall]

I finally got it to work. I did 2 things differently. When I placed the original wavy map over the image, I did not set the fill to repeat. Secondly (and this may be the real difference) I deleted he original images on the page 5 instructions. I have attached my final product and the animated flag I mentione previously



Here is my animated flag as well :-)

[dcahall]

Sorry, here is the waving texas flag........

[Gare]

Can you share how you animated the flag?

BTW, folks, if you click on the thumbnail, it'll preview full-screen and animate, at least it does in FF.

My Best,

Gary

[dcahall]

I made the animated flag by using the techniques you outlined in the "An Experiment in Photographic Special Effects" article. First I created the flag object and gave it a name (which you must do to animate something in Xara) and then I used the Mold tool as you outlined in your article to change the shape of the flag in a series of frames. I am sure that if I played around with it a little more, I could get it to go a little smoother but I was trying to learn how to do something like this and thought it came out as "acceptable". I also got some ideas on the subject from another tutorial I had watched (can not remember who wrote it) about a bouncing ball. This was my first real attempt at animation using the PGD tool. I am attachig the .xar file if anyone wants to see how it works.

BTW: I think the subject of animation would be a good thread. I would like to see some type of enhancements in the Xara products for animation and even some combination of the PGD and Xara 3D to strengthen what could be done.

[Gare]

Thanks!

Now that's participating! I like it when a post shares techniques and extends what the original tutorial was all about.

I don't know of a lot of people who have created a bouncing ball tutorial, but there's one right here on the Xone:

Having a Ball with Xara

As far as enhancements, the Request Department is >>>right here<<<

As far as animation goes, Xara is capable of keyframing shapes (and groups of shapes) as long as you've named the shape with the Name Gallery, and that the transition you want to create is a "legal" one in Shockwave (swf) file format. It's not really a constraint, because as you've shown with the flag animation, sometimes you can get away without keyframing. Other times, no keyframes produces an animation that's too choppy.

Perhaps if the demand is great enough, we could host a special tutorial, or a main one, in the months to come on animation.

My Best,

Gary

[dcahall]

Yes, that was the bouncing ball tutorial that gave me the idea (of course combined with your techniques).

Off topic: Have you ever looked at a program called ArtRage (not really a competitor for Xara - ArtRage is more of an "art" tool)? Your tutorials are much better than the tutorials for that product. I would love to see you do some for that product as well.

[Gare]

Thank you, dcahall (you got a first name, sport?)—

I use ArtRage a lot, yes. Bought the Studio 3 version in the Spring, and it's a toss-up when I need some textured paintings whether to use ArtRage of Corel Painter.

These products compete with Xara Designer not at all.

You figure out a way to clone me, and I'd be happy to produce some tutorials for ArtRage.

-g