ADProAnimMaker version 1.01 ©1994 Matt Shaw New Version 1.01 ADPro and Art Department Professional is a trademark of ASDG inc. Lightwave 3D is a trademark of NewTek, Inc. ADProAnimMaker is copyrighted, but freely distributable as long as all files remain intact. What is it? ADProAnimMaker(APA) was designed to simplify anim creation using ASDG's incredible image processing program Art Department Professional. ASDG does provide FRED with ADPro for all purpose batch processing and they sell ProControl as an alternative. I wrote APA because it took me forever to instruct some friends on how to use FRED to make a simple anim. They wanted to render some images in Lightwave 3D and make some Amiga playable anims quickly. I think you will find APA easy to use and a lot quicker than FRED, but still with a lot of power if you need it under the hood. Read on. Requirements: 1. Any Amiga that has enough ram to run ADPro well. About 5 megs IMHO. 2. Art DepartMent Professional. I use 2.5, no guarantees on compatibility with older versions. To install APA: I recommend placing APA in the directory with ADPro. This is not necessary, but it is convenient. Run ADPro before APA. If you don't it will complain, but will still allow to do everything except access ADPro of course. Set the global settings you want in ADPro such as dither, dither intensity, render screen mode, palette before making the anim. APA will not alter these settings. A good example of where this is helpful is that you can load any image into ADPro and lock the palette to it and that palette will be used for the entire animation. GETTING AROUND APA: ************************************************************************** MENU ITEMS APA has 2 menuitems, Save and About. Save will save APA's config file where APA is. This saves settings like the anim name, loader used and the other settings on the main screen. About brings you to a screen with copyright information and info about contacting me if you need to. FRAMES FOR ANIM On the left side of the screen is a rather large scrolling list. This will show your list of frames for the anim. Frames are added to the anim in the order in which they appear in the FRAMES FOR ANIM list. MAKELIST Hitting this button will bring up a file requester. Use it to select the directory where you anim images are. Once you select a directory the contents will be displayed on the FRAMES FOR ANIM list and the number of frames will appear on the top right of that area. LOAD APA also has the ability to use a custom list if you wish of images. This allows you to make one with an ASCII text editor and use it. In this way you can have images in several places and in any order you wish. The format of the file is simple, an ASCII file that shows the full path and the filename of the image. Frames are added to the anim in the order in which they appear in the FRAMES FOR ANIM list. SAVE The SAVE button saves the current list in case you wish to edit it with an ASCII text editor or to save time reading in a big directory. It brings up a file requester for this purpose. ANIM NAME-- Text requester Enter the full path and filename of the anim you wish you create in the ANIM NAME string requester. Hit return when done. IMAGE LOADER-- Text requester Enter the ADPro Loader you wish to use here. You could just leave it set to UNIVERSAL and let ADPro figure it out, but if all you images are one format the anim will be made faster if you set it to the correct image type. The format is exactly the same as the list that appears in ADPro. If you missspell the loader, ADPro will report an error during Anim creation. See errors below. PROC SCRIPT My goal was to make this program easy as pie, but I couldn't resist adding in this twinkie to add to its power. It defaults to off. The purpose of the Process Script is to allow you to write a script that can make ADPro do anything it can do from Arexx ( pretty much everthing it can do) before putting the frame into the anim. If the PROC SCRIPT button is checked, every line in the Process Script will be sent to ADPro before frame is added to the anim. An error in the script will stop the anim generation. See Errors below. EDIT SCRIPT The Edit Script button brings you to a screen that allows you to load, save, test and edit process scripts. See the next paragraph, Process Script screen. ************************************************************************** PROCESS SCRIPT SCREEN If you don't want to add scripts, skip this paragraph. The Process Script feature of APA allows you to do all kinds of things to your images before you roll them into an anim. You can do anything ADPro can do to them. Examples: Flip them on the horizontal axis and Scale them down to 80 percent of their original size. APA looks for an ASCII file named ProcessScript.APA. A Process script is included with the archive that does the horizontal flip and 80 percent scale. The action lines are just AREXX commands for ADPro. See your ADPro manual for examples for everything ADPRo can do to an Image. Every line is executed top to bottom on every image. The LOAD button allows you to load in a Process Script from anywhere on your harddisk and the SAVE button saves the file as the ProcessScript.APA file that APA uses. To test a line while ADPro is running, click on the line to select it and hit the TESTLINE button. ADPro's success or failure will be reported. This way you can try out the script before processing you entire anim. Use the OK button to return to the main screen. ************************************************************************** SAVE TYPE -- Rollover button ADPro as of version 2.5 allows two saving options. Save the rendered image or save whatever portion of the image fits on the display screen. Use this button to toggle between them. Saving the visible screen is rarely used IMHO, but hey, its an option in ADPro so its in here. COMP LEVEL -- Rollover button Comp Level or Compression Level is an option in ADPro that allows you to choose whether the resulting animation is compressed for Smaller file size or for Faster generation. Supposedly the resulting playback speed is the same, but it will take longer to make the anim using the Smaller setting. COMP MODE -- Rollover button Comp Mode or Compression Mode sets the compression mode used to creat the anim. Byte is the traditional older Anim OpCod-5 mode, Word and Long are Anim OpCode-8. Word and Long work very well on all Amigas and especially well on AGA ones with 32bit chip ram access. I use Long all the time on my ECS machines. REPLACE -- Checkmark button Replace allows you to decide to append an existing anim or to start a new one. If Replace is off and the Anim Name is the same as an existing anim, the new frame will be appended on the the end of the existing anim. WRAP AT END -- Checkmark button If you want the generated anim to loop at the end, check the Wrap button. This appends the first two frames of the anim to the end in order to make it continuously loop correctly. If you make an anim of say an aircraft spinning 360 degrees around the last frames and the first frames are already the same and the Wrap option would introduce a pause after each time through the spin. MAKEANIM Hitting Makeanim starts the whole animation process. One by one images are loaded into ADPro, the process script is executed if selected, ADPro is issued an execute to render the data to its current settings and then ADPro saves the resulting image into the Anim file you instructed it to create. Status of the anim creation is given in the Status line at the lower right bottom of the screen. Any error reported back by ADPro will stop the anim creation. STOP--Toggle button If you want to stop the anim creation, click the Stop button. It will highlight and the anim creation process will stop as soon as it can and the anim will be deleted. STATUS: This text gadget reports all the results of your actions and the status as the anim is generated. ERRORS If you enter an inappropriate entry into a requester or ADPro has problems creating the anim, the screen will flash and a message will usually appear in the Status line. REVISION: 1.01 New version to correct errot that caused ADPro to leave its meter windows on after an error in a process script occured. 1.0 Written on 3/26/94 in about 5 hours. KNOWN BUGS: Its version 1.01 due to a bug. None at this time. ( We'll see how long that lasts. :) ) If you have any comments or features you could really use contact me via E-Mail and I'll see what I can do. I do intend this program to be easy to use which does limit it somewhat. My previous program BatchPro is much more suited to really batch altering images. But it is more difficult to use and is not really geared for Anim creation. Matt Shaw 1994 *************************************************************************** * | * * Jaeger Software, Inc. | Matt Shaw * * 7800 White Cliff Terrace | M.Shaw15@genie.geis.com * * Rockville, MD 20855 | Matt_-_Shaw@cup.portal.com * * 1-301-948-6862 | * * | * * Makers of 32 bit | * * Flight Simulators | * ***************************************************************************