Animation in Xara Revisited

[csehz]

Gary thanks the answers just again,

Egg I am amazed how smoothly your planes are going, the green one exactly that path which I also tried, the white with that whole circle path. As I understand sometimes you put very small frame times, even there is a 0, those are for smoothing the turnings?

[Egg Bramhill]

Yes chehz, yes that's correct. In my animation there are two states for each graphic, a start and and an end position. The start position time determines how long the tween should exist between to two frames (0.7secs in the first frame for example). The second frame I set the timing to 0.001 which displays as zero on the timeline but it works. This way avoids a staggered wait between frames.

[csehz]

That logic is extremelly smart, I am analyzing like in Terminator 2 was that super intelligent robot arm

As I can see you also doing a name change during the fly, so the green airplane is 'plane1' in the first two frames, after a copy exactly to the same place but already as 'plane2'.
Moreover, removing for example the the 'Many' fills from 'plane2', anyway also for 'plane1' the same, it turns out that it is a group which is a circle. So I assume you use the rotate feature to follow the smooth fly.


Could you advise how you create this circle + airplane, I would think that the circle is transparent but seems no, having some fill. Briefly, I was not able to reproduce it

[Gare]

@ csehz—

This fact might not be of help immediately, but in the future:

Xara prefers that when you want to go from transparent to opaque in a Flash animation you use 1% for transparent, and not 0% because zero suggests that something doesn't exist on the page. And when you want top go from transparent to opaque, you begin at 1% and end up at 99% and not 100, because Xara sees 100% as having no transparency properties.

My Best,

Gary

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi csehz, no no transparencies but circles with no fill, no stroke(line). The trick is to ensure the visible object is always within the containing circle.
I attach an animation with the circles set to no fill no line to show just the object moving and a second one with the circles visible (I've added lines within the circles so you can see the rotation.
Setting the display time to zero stops any pauses in the animation. It gets to that frame and instantly starts the next frame so no hiccups.



And showing the circles.

[csehz]

Gary thanks the transparency advice, and Egg please, this example is perfect for education :-) So the key is to have the circle as no fill, no line, and the object has to be inside the circle.

Unfortunately I am actually stucked in a weird thing, why this attached airplane is falling apart at rotating with the circle? You see that grey bottom part. Anyway ideas are coming sometimes from mistakes, so I could simulate the crashing of it but actually that is not my target All of the shapes are checked they do not have individual name, so not clear why that is animated separately

Airplane_fall_apart.swf



Airplane_fall_apart.xar

[Boy]

What a great tutorial diagram, Egg. Makes it very clear!

[Egg Bramhill]

Cheers Boy, it's been an interesting thread.

csehz, I know exactly what you mean, I had the same issue when I created my first paper plane animation. I found the only way to avoid this was to create a bitmap copy of the plane. As all vectors are grouped it should really act under the same rotation but under certain circumstance that I couldn't work out it didn't. Sorry, I meant to mention this earlier. One thing re using a bitmap is the object becomes a square and it's quite easy to find that this bitmap square is outside the circle and thus effect it's rotation which is no longer circular. If you look at rocket3 in my last xar file the rocket bitmap is slightly outside the circle and subsequently effected the rotation. Fortunately this wasn't to any great degree.

I've created this animation on revealing a path using a similar technique. The chalk brush circle (converted to a bitmap) is revealed in a similar method.

[Egg Bramhill]

Here's your animation but the plane has been converted to a bitmap. This avoids the breaking up.

[Gare]

Having pieces come apart in a group when animating is a certainty in Xara, as well as Flash, I think.

The workaround of making a bitmap is inspired, Egg.

Overall, there seems to be a problem with keeping the center of rotation centered. I had the world's worst time getting the center of rotation to stay put with a lot of shapes here:




Ultimately, my solution was to put the component pieces into a circle, in position, and then make the circle invisible and rotate it. By the nature of this animation scheme, circles "prefer" to have their center of rotation at their center.

I wish I understood this quirk and limitation better!

My Best,
Gary