OT: animation [was Re: iMovie vs Final Cut Pro-- and Final Cut Express]

[Alex Rice]

On Jan 12, 2004, at 5:50 PM, erik hansen wrote:
> can we combine video and animation
> a la Roger Rabbit, scripted in Revolution
> and interactive at all times?

BTW Richard Harris, director of _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_ published in 
2001 _The Animator's Survival Kit_. I have it in front of me and it is 
truly a great book.

To do what you describe- combining video and animation, with full 
control, I think you would have to use a combination of Quicktime, Gif 
animation, and PNG frame sequences. Or some or all of those. If full 
control and interactivity was not needed I guess AfterEffects or 
something else could be used.

BTW Anyone interested in character animation, or 2D or 3D rendering, 
Flash, Director, or animation in general, keep an eye on announcements 
from Microsoft about Expression3 and LivingCels. Real soon hopefully.

Microsoft bought Creaturehouse last year, and their website is kind of 
shut-down, but you can get some old info about their apps here: 
<http://www.creaturehouse.com/>

The drawing programs Expression and LivingCels feature a technology 
named "skeletal strokes". <http://www.creaturehouse.com/skstroke.htm>. 
There are some illustrations and scientific papers at that URL that are 
very fascinating.

Skeletal strokes is a very innovative drawing technology. From the 
artist's point of view it really lends itself to expressively making 
animations, characters, scenery, etc. It's hard to describe how 
amazingly cool this software is.

Skeletal strokes can be higher order, i.e. defined in terms of other 
skeletal strokes. This can be used to easily build up paint strokes 
consisting of multitudes of body parts, organisms, plants, landscapes, 
whatever.

Or a skeletal stroke can be higher order but defined in terms of it's 
self. Then you have a recursively defined stroke, and you are painting 
with a fractal paint brush!

Or a skeletal stroke can be as refined a watercolor stroke or pen and 
ink.

Skeletal strokes also have features for anchoring, repeating segments, 
variable width, variable transparency, and multi-view strokes. The 
expressive possibilities are endless.

LivingCels can export movies to Quicktime, but it can also generate 
individual frames in TIFF, or in Expression3 format. So a movie could 
be converted to animated-gif 89a, or a sequence of PNG frames with full 
alpha-channel transparency. So a lot of possibilities for getting the 
animations into Revolution.

It is a 2D animation system, however I mention 3D because there is a 
lot of support for 2.5D animation in Expression. For instance, a 
multiple-view skeletal stroke with relative anchoring can give the 
appearance of a character rotating or moving in 3D. Also with texture 
mapping, perspective transformations and a mesh-warp grid, there is a 
lot of room for drawing in 3D without having to go actual 3D and create 
wireframe, objects, and physical models ala OpenGL- where you get (in 
theory) more realism in the rendering, but actually lose most of the 
expressive capability for character animation. Unless you are truly a 
master of Maya or these other extremely complex apps and you can bring 
life into 3D wireframe or rotoscoped models.

There are several 2D animation apps that kind of try to do what 
LivingCels does, like ToonBoom Studio, Moho, and others. But they just 
don't compare.


Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | 
<http://mindlube.com>

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco