ali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer) (01/04/88)
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Those of you making animations and short movies with VideoScape 3D
might consider purchasing "The Director." I've had VS3D for several
months, and just recently got The Director, and the task of creating
animations and recording them has become, in most ways, simpler.
The Director has a "anim" command that gives you full control over an
anim file --- It lets you create the next screen of an animation (by
reading the patches and applying them to either the previous screen
or any other screen you want). This lets you load several animations,
for instance, and switch back and forth between them --- even interactively!
You can also mix looping animations with those that don't loop; you can
specify how many times a looping animation should loop, before going on
to another animation, etc. This also makes the task of recording seperate
anim files to VCR easier --- Provided you have enough memory, you can
load & play back several animations from The Director without having to
stop/start the VCR. (Otherwise you would've needed to create one long
animation from VS3D --- possible (for instance Allen's CAR.DEMO),
but not always desirable as it takes a long time to create and if you
want to change something you'll need to redo the whole thing.)
One disadvantage of playing back anim files with The Director is the
reduced frame rate --- on the average, I noticed about 10-20% lower frame
rate. If the frame rate is important for you, you need to consider this.
But, on the other hand, The Director lets you switch screens and do other
things while showing an animation! You can even pull up the WB screen
halfway and the animation keeps on going in the background... In the
last 2 hours, I've been fooling around with 4 VS3D animations, playing them
back in different order/speeds, etc, and, thanks to The Director's
interactive nature, it's been a pleasant experience.
Of course the program also offers many other features, such as sound,
full control over the blitter, slideshow animations, and you can mix
all these with your animations as well. I just haven't had the time to
play with all this...
Anyway, if you've got VS3D, and you are serious about creating some neat
stuff, do consider The Director. At only ~$55, it's a great buy! The only
other thing one can ask for is the interactive object editor (which will
be out soon, I hear...).
Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu
ps:
* I'm not affiliated with The Right Answers Group in any way.
* The Director GURUed on me once, when I tried to run Preferences while
I was playing back an animation. That's it, in about 5 hours of use.
* I have VS3D version 1.00, PlayAnim 3.10, and Director version 1.2.