StrataVision Animation

1. You will want the full memory of the Mac, so make sure StrataVision is the only program running on the computer, and that it has a sufficient amount of RAM allocated to it.

2. Open your StrataVision document and insert a camera. Double-click on the image of the camera at any time to open a camera window. Resize the camera window to exactly 320 x 240 pixels. Position and orient the camera in the modeling window so that you can see the desired view of the model camera (i.e., in the camera window). This will be the starting position for our animation.

3. Select Windows > Palettes > Show Animation Palette.

4. The current camera position will be the first key frame. We're going to add more keyframes, without worrying much about the time intervals. Click on "Advance" in the Animation palette. The "Now" or "current time" icon () will move forward one second.This advances the time 1 second in preparation for defining the next key frame. If necessary, the "End of Time" position will advance too.

   Now

   End-of-time

   Key Frame

5. In the modeling window, adjust the camera to give you another view. When you do this, a new key frame icon will appear in the timeline at the current time. This camera position represents the position the camera will have at the end of the first second of animation. A second key frame will appear in the Animation palette time line. The following graphic shows three key frames.
   

6. The "Preview" button in the animation palette produces a crude animation, rendered in wire frame, advancing from the first key frame you defined to the last. To see the sequence from the camera's point of view, remember to open a camera window before selecting Preview.

7. If you want to see the animation run at full speed you'll have to render a movie. Since the computer isn't capable of computing complex 3D animations in real time, we need to compute the frames and store them to disk for. To do this, select Render from the Rendering menu. This dialog box will look familiar. Select the desired renderer and rendering attributes, and select the All frames checkbox.

   Remember! each frame of the animation will take as much time to render as if it were being done as a single still. When you are "debugging" an animation it is suggested that you use a fairly quick algorithm, possibly even wire-frame.

   As with single renderings, select "Render Now" or "Render Later". If you haven't previously set the size of the camera window, you may do so in this dialog box. (DO NOT use a full-screen window!)

8. When you do click on "Render Now" or "Render Later" you will see two new dialog boxes. In the first, you will have the opportunity to provide the file name under which the animation will be saved. In the second you can set the CODEC to use and the number of bits per pixel to use when storing the animation. It is recommended that you select Cinepak at High quality, 256 colors. This will make the animation compatible with Premiere, and will save some space. When the sequence is rendered the individual frames will be stored to disk as a QUICKTIME file (c.f. pp 4.64-4.66 in the old manual). This is a standardized animation format which can be opened and played in various programs and on different computer platforms, including Macintoshes and PCs. (It can also get very big.)

   ... time passes ...

9. When the last frame is drawn a "player window" will appear, with buttons for "Stop, Rewind, Frame-back, Play, Frame-forward, Loop", in the upper left corner (reading left to right). Select the play button to see your animation. See if you can select "Play from memory" in the Animation menu (it will depend on your animation size, machine memory, etc.) and play it again. It should be significantly smoother.

10. You've just made a simple movie. Using the same techniques, you can now create your final animation.

Notes

• You can use adjust time intervals between frames to "speed up" or "slow down" the motion. This is done by dragging the key frame icons around in the Animation palette. Remember, key frames are object-specific. That is, they define the motion/transformation of a single object in the environment, and each object can have multiple key frames. Each will be displayed in turn when the object is selected, but not before.

• Key frame information, whether for a camera or an object within the scene, is stored with the object itself. Thus, if you copy and paste an object from one document to another, the keyframe data goes with it, and, if you add keyframes to a Shape (a subset of the model), the specified effect will occur in the finished animation, but the shape will not display key frames when selected. That's because the motion is contained "within" the shape, the shape itself isn't moving.

• If you forget to select the correct compression settings (codec, compression level, number of colors) all is not lost. You can adjust the finished animation by opening the QuickTime movie file in StrataVision and then selecting File > Save As ... and making a new file. This can be quite instructive, since the file sizes may vary quite dramatically (by 10:1 or more).

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