baer@qiclab.scn.rain.com (Ken Baer) (02/12/91)
I have been receiving countless repeated requests for information on
Animation:Journeyman, so I decided to post it here. I hope this information
is useful and answers some of your questions. Apologies to the net.gods,
and those of you who believe information about commercial products
posted by their vendors is blatent advertising, hit your <N> key now.
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Animation:Journeyman
--------------------
Journeyman is made up of six executable modules, Sculpture, Painter
(that integrates with Sculpture), Character, Action, Direction, and Render.
Sculpture
---------
Modeler:
- The interface uses cubic spline curves to build 3D cubic patches rather than
vectors
and polygons.
- You can adjust the 3D curved surfaces with simple and intuitive mouse
operations.
- Full tension control is provided to give you that fine control that today's
professional demands.
- Hard edges and sharp points make it possible to construct mechanical objects
in addition to organic objects.
- Autosculpting allows you to build complex shaped from simple front and
side views.
- Grouping and Hide functions allow you to work on specific parts of the
object without unnecessary redrawing.
- The two viewing windows allow you to look at the object from any two
views at the same time.
Painter:
- Allows you to quickly render objects in as shaded polygons.
- Common paint functions include freedraw, linedraw, eclipse, fill, brush
operations, and several other functions, all with DPaint keyboard
equivalents.
- Any 32 color brush can be decaled onto an object at any angle and at any
scale.
- Loads and saves in IFF files.
Character
---------
- You can design and build articulated figures.
- Load segment shapes that you created in the Sculpture module, and assign
heirarchy, attributes (color, reflectivity, transparency, index of
refraction, etc.)
- You can display any segments in either curved mode or bounding box mode,
making it easier to do general placement, and fine tuning placement.
- Like Apprentice, Character supports sub-figures, and figure substitution
(being able to layer whole figures, not just objects, e.g. using a fully
articulated hand for different characters and only making it once.
- An algorithmic texture interface is provided. Texures such as wood, marble,
mottled,
checker, bumpy, etc. can be modified and tested in this interface.
Action
------
- This is where you to design relative motion for figures and objects.
- It allows you to create three basic kinds of motion for your characters and
objects; skeletal actions, muscle morphing and spine morphing. Skeletal
actions involve moving the individual segments of a character around their
respective pivots. You would use this kind of action for walking, jumping,
and general actions that involve multi-segment motion. Muscle morphing
allows you to take individual control points in the segments and tweak them
over time. This is useful when you just want to have a small part of an
object change, or for action like biceps bulging. And finally, spine
morphing
gives you much more control and power over changing the shape of an object or
character. You create a reference spine when you design the object or
character
in the Sculpture module. Then bend the spine inside the object as you would
with a real spine.
- When in the spine mode, you bend the spine at its control points, and the
other points in the object will bend with it.
- You have full 3D directional control, so you can even twist objects with
spine morphing.
- Spine morphing can work with individual segments, or the character as a
whole.
- Of course, you can combine all three kinds of motion in a single action.
- All actions can now be refined with time graph editing (channels).
Direction
---------
- Direction is where you bring all the elements of Journeyman together to
define the final animation.
- You can create motion paths for your objects, characters, camera, target,
and light sources.
- Motion paths can be linear or cubic spline (with tension control).
- You can view your world from any angle and at any scale, or from the camera
(at any frame).
- Your objects are represented in wireframe, and you can choose to view them
in full curve, vector, bounding box, or bounding rectangle.
- You can also see all actions and morphs you have defined.
- Motion channels allow you to define motion, and transitions without using
keyframes. Rather, the channel uses a graph for the values over time.
You have full tension control, meaning the transitions can be sharp and
abrupt, or smooth and gradual. This kind of control gives you the ability
to make natural fluid motion in addition to mechanical motion. Channels
are provided for each character path, the target path (where the camera is
pointed), the camera, and each light source. This technique has only been
available in high end workstation software like WaveFront, Alias, and
Symbolics.
Render:
- Scanline and Ray Tracing are both supported.
- Shadows and transparency are now supported in scanline mode.
- Output resolution and aspect ratio are user selectable.
- ANIM and IFF24 are supported.
- Render can be run from commandline (or from a script)
Animation:Journeyman brings the next generation of character animation
to the Amiga. Full cubic patch modelling and rendering bring new
power and ease of use that have only been available on systems costing
tens of thousands of dollars. Journeyman also features ray-tracing,
IFF texture decaling, cubic spline motion paths for objects, camera, and
lights, channel motion control, muscle morphing, and spine morphing.
24-bit image generation is also supported (24 bit output is in IFF24).
Journeyman retails for $500 on the Amiga 2500 and the Amiga 3000 (Journeyman
requires at least a 68020 with a math chip to run). An upgrade path is
provided
for owners of Animation:Apprentice. Due to the specialized nature of our
intended market, Journeyman is available only direct from Hash Enterprises.
For more information call or write:
Hash Enterprises
2800 E. Evergreen Blvd.
Vancouver, WA 98661
(206) 573-9427
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// -Ken Baer. Programmer/Animator, Hash Enterprises / Earthling
\X/ Usenet: baer@qiclab.UUCP or PLink: KEN BAER
"What?!? Sore again?" -- Bugs Bunny to Yosemity Sam