Animation in Xara

[Big Frank]

there's a few on this page to look at for inspiration

http://www.crossed-flag-pins.com/animated-flag-gif.html

[Gare]

Does the swf video appear in post #39 now?

I swapped in a different file.

TIA,
—g

[handrawn]

#39 yes - thanks Gary [#35 still no]

[Gare]

The error was between the chair and the keyboard.

When writing the swf, I didn't specify that an internal player goes along with it.

#35 now plays?

Thanks!

-g

[dcahall]

Before I saw your #35 and #39 which are excellent, I created the animation below. It does not animated as smoothly in the exported gif and it shows in the preiview in Xara but I think you would get the idea. Obviously not as elegent as yours but I was just trying to find a way. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted the .xar file but I did this by drawing the flag as a series of lines which I could then manipulate individually and elimate the tween problem with the mold tool.


(click to watch it "wave")

BTW: I love what you did with #39. That would take a ton of work to accomplish with Xara but I now believe it could be done but I do not think it would work out as smooth. Especially as a .gif file...

[Big Frank]

step one, a 250 frame animation found at the link i posted above, imported into xara, reduced to 125 frmes and manipulated a bit

File Information:
Description	An animated GIF Using an 8 bit, 64 colour globally optimised palette Not dithered
Image Size	185 by 156 pixels
File Size	593189 bytes

next step, if i have the motivation, will be to covert all frames to vector

further on will have to be a way to add a pattern, that'll be fun :/

[handrawn]

#35 now rocks..

nice flag Frank

[Gare]

The flapping green cloth is an excellent example of what Maya, 3D Studio and other modeling programs can do with Dynamics. I believe that's clothing dynamics with a force such as wind applied.

Well, I came up with something that might help along the flag animation. Dave, what you did is quite innovative.

I used the "Even Wave" Deformation Live Effect, each frame changing the Phase setting.



It's a correct assumption that a more fluid animation of a waving flag could be done in Xara...it's a question of patience. What this example needs (and it's attached below) is a more critical eye than I have at the moment, to see where the highlights should move frame by frame, and perhaps even a shorter onscreen duration. I used .2 seconds and it looks to be too slow. I need more frames, too, but I'm just demonstrating a Live Effect you already own that puts waves on a vector or bitmap object.

By the way, Google's Swiffy is wonderful, for converting Flash (on its way out) to HTML, with a little CSS and JavaScript embedded.

Bring your SWF files here!

Here's a link to a page Barbara worked on a little. It's about 1MB and this is NOT Flash or MPEG-4.

A CSS converted animation

As I mentioned before, getting an animation done is the hard part. File formats for DVD authoring and the Web is "kid's stuff".

My Best,

Gary

[dcahall]

Big Frank Your link has some excellent waving flags......I looked at the one for the US and loved it.

My point to this entire thread is coming around to the fact that there are some challenges to creating animations in PGD.

1. What I see when I click on the Preview icon is not always what is going to be rendered when you export your animation. As an example, when I clicked the preview link in the UI (not the preview in browser link), the animation was pretty smooth. After I exported it (in both gif and swf formats), the animation was far more choppy.

2. You should be able to use any of the Xara functions (i.e. mold) on a keyframed object to change it from one frame to another and have the object tweened to the new frame.

3. It would also be great if you could add control points to be used by the the mold function. That would give me far more leverage in deciding the shape of an object and its contents (i.e. the fill or merged shapes when I drew the Texas flag) so you would have more control over the entire keyframed object.

OK - those are some starters.

FRANK: Why does your gif animate on the page without clicking it and the ones Gare and I included require you to click them:

BTW: For those who may have looked at the other thread I started about breaking the graphic and web functions into separate programs, IMHO the animation features/challengs represent why I think separate programs that address specific topics is preferred. Again, this is probably a minority opion but is mine.

[Big Frank]

FRANK: Why does your gif animate on the page without clicking it and the ones Gare and I included require you to click them

Any images uploaded to this forum and placed in-line are displayed as-is (like my animation) unless they exceed a certain size (dimensions, not kilobytes), in which case they are automatically resized (like yours).

The key to smooth animations is "keep 'em small". Not everybody has a whizzing video card with nitrogen cooling. As you can see from my flag above, an animation doesn't have to be big to be interesting.