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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Mindlube Software | <http://mindlube.com>
what a waste of thumbs that are opposable to make machines that are disposable -Ani DiFranco
_______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
