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Click on the "Sphere" tool in your toolbox at the left side of the screen. Mine looks like this: |
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Yours may look different (probably blue), but that's OK. It should look like a sphere, though. My icons are different because of a plugin. So if you just see this: |
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...you're OK. With this Sphere tool selected, move your mouse to the right to your "Front" view. Hold the SHIFT key down, and draw a sphere. (To draw a sphere, hold your mouse button down and move your mouse diagonally, then let go of the mouse button)
It is extremely important that you hold the SHIFT key down before you draw the sphere. Holding the SHIFT key down guarantees a perfect sphere. Otherwise, you could end up with a squashed or stretched sphere. |
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Once you've drawn your sphere, you should see this in your FRONT view: |
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If you don't see that, go to the Edit menu and click "undo," then try again. Hey, we're done modeling! |
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Click on the "Direct Earth Texture Link" above to download a .ZIP file containing the graphic we'll be using to texture our Earth.
You will need ZIP file extraction software to open ZIP files. Most computers have this software installed already. If you need help with uncompressing ZIP files, go get help! Then come back. :-) You should end up with a 9.9 Megabyte PNG file somewhere on your hard disk.
Let's have Art of Illusion wrap this image around our sphere, shall we? OK, first, right-click your Sphere object in the object list at the right side of the AoI screen. The object will look like this: |
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Right-click the Sphere object (yours doesn't have to be "Sphere 4;" it might be "Sphere 1" or "Sphere 2," depending on how many times you messed up and pressed undo). On the right-click menu, click "Set Texture..." and you'll see this window: |
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Good. See that "New Texture..." button? Click that. Then you'll see this window |
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Type what I've typed in - "Earth Surface" - for the Name. Then choose "Image Mapped" under "Type." Click OK. A New Texture window appears: |
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Cool! Let's load up our Earth texture file. Click the GRAY square to the immediate right of "Diffuse Color." Do NOT click the white square. This window will appear: |
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Click the "Load..." button... then it's time to locate the PNG file you unzipped! Locate it on the disk and click "OK"...Your computer may take a few seconds to load this image, but then you'll see this: |
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Great! The black square around our Earth image means it's selected. Click OK. |
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Amazing! It looks like we're done! But we're not. Notice how we can see all the continents by looking at the front HALF of the Earth? Weird! This means the texture is not stretched, or "mapped" properly to fit all the way around our sphere. Click OK. Now we're back here: |
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Click the "Edit Mapping..." button at the bottom of this window. Now we see the texture mapping window: |
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In the "Mapping" pull-down menu below the Earth image, select "Spherical" instead of "Projection." Perfect! Now we really ARE done! Click OK to close this "Texture Mapping" window, then click OK one more time to close the "Object Texture" window that was behind it. |
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Alright, enough texturing. We should be back at our normal AoI four-view layout now. Press the space bar to switch to the "Move Object" tool. Now click on your Earth sphere to select it - it will have little red squares around it if it is selected.
Now let's open up the Animation Score.
Go to the "Animation" menu (between "Tools" and "Scene") and click "Show Score" at the top of the menu.
AoI seems to have a little bug here. He doesn't seem to want to open the animation score on all computers. Not sure why. Hopefully my writing about this in a tutorial will embarrass someone enough that they diagnose and fix the problem. ;-)
Anyway, if your Score doesn't open, move to the bottom "bar" of the AoI screen, a little thick border at the very bottom. Hold your mouse button down on it, and move your mouse up while holding the mouse button down. This should reveal the Animation Score. It looks like this: |
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Wow! How plain. I'll explain the basics: On the left side, we have our "Sphere" object details. We can animate its position and its rotation.
Moving to the right, you'll see the animation timeline. The timeline says things like "0.33," "2.0," and "3.33" along the top. These are the time markings, in seconds. If we were to play an animation right now, the little green vertical bar at the left would start moving toward the right to show us how many seconds have passed.
The buttons on the far right are totally un-useful to us right now. If you want, look them up in the AoI manual. The manual is awesome, and, by jiminy, you'll never find a better manual for any comparable free 3D software package that's written in Java by a person whose name rhymes with Reeter Reestman. I guarantee it. |
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Anyway! (sheesh)
With your sphere still selected, go to the "Animation" menu at the top of the AoI screen. Click "Add Track to Selected Objects..." ---> "Rotation" ----> "Procedural." Those little "--->" arrows mean that you'll find sub-menus to click on. You will then see this down in your Animation Score: |
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Double-click on the label "Rotation (procedural)." Then you'll see a new window open. It's blank. A blank canvas upon which to perform our animation masterpiece. This is an incredible feature of Art of Illusion - we can plug nodes together, manipulating values to change how objects animate, without having to do the animation "by hand," frame-by-frame. Let's do a basic procedural animation: |
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Go to the Insert menu TWO times. Here's what you'll click:
1. Insert ---> Values ---> Time
2. Insert ---> Functions ---> Scale/Shift
Now you should see two gray boxes in your blank canvas. |
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Now connect the Time module to the Scale/Shift module by holding down your mouse button on the black arrow next to the word "Time", and moving your mouse to the right until you're over the black arrow on the left side of the Scale/Shift module. Release your mouse button. You should see a wire appear between the two: |
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Now do the same to connect the Scale/Shift module with the "Y" box at right. |
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Perfect! OK, one more thing. Double-click on the Scale/Shift module to open its options window: |
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Change the "1.0" value as shown above to "10." That's right, ten. Click OK. Then click OK again to close the Procedural Rotation window.
So, we've multiplied the value of "Time" by 10 and fed that into the Y axis rotation. This is the "engine" that makes our Earth rotate! As we multiply (or "scale") the value of Time by higher numbers, our sphere will rotate faster. If we scale by smaller numbers, our sphere will rotate more slowly.
If you ever want to rotate around the X or Z axes, just plug the Scale/Shift module into one of those. Or plug it into more than one, and see what happens! Or create different Scale/Shift module + Time chains, and plug each into its own axis! Ahhh...exploration is fun. :-) |
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OK, but HOW DO WE SEE WHAT WE JUST ANIMATED? Sheesh!
You're right. You've been so patient. Good kitty. |
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Go to the "Animation" menu and click "Preview Animation." Change the values in the window to match what I have below, then click OK: |
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Now you should see your sphere animating! It's a rough preview, but it works!!! If it doesn't work, please go back and double-check your work. |
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OK, that's enough of a preview. Now click OK. |
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Part 4. Render Preparation |
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Let's get ready for our final, nice-looking version. Go to the "Scene" menu and click "Environment..." at the bottom of the menu. |
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Ambient Color is sort of gray! That won't do. Ambient color will make almost any render look uglier than it's supposed to be. It's an old "cheater" technique from back when computer graphics were supposed to look bad because things were old and computers were slow back then. :-)
Let's turn Ambient Color to black, which is the same as turning it off. Click once on the gray-colored square next to "Ambient Color" to bring up a color picker. |
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Change the "Color Model" to "HSV" and turn "Value" all the way to zero. This will give us black. And we only had to use one slider. RGB makes you use all three to do this. HSV is SOOOO much easier for picking colors in general. Click OK, then click OK again to close the "Select Environment Properties" window.
Now...go to the "Scene" menu and click "Render Immediately." If you did everything right, you'll see something similar to this: |
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OK, we just created our own little Earth! It's not animated yet. But that's OK. Neat. Click "Close" to close the window, and "Save" if you want to save the image to your computer. Just don't email it to your local astronomical observatory and claim that you found a new planet on the other side of the Sun that appears to be identical to the Earth. That plot was already played out in a 1970s movie.
Please go to File ---> Save As now and save your project somewhere. Don't lose all that work! |
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Part 5. Rendering the Animation |
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Looking back at our last render, the Earth is kind of small. If you want to enlarge it, move to the "Camera 1" window in AoI's main screen, and hold CTRL + Right Mouse Button and move your mouse down. That will zoom you in on the Earth. Moving your mouse up will zoom out. |
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Note: The next part involves video editing software. You do have some, don't you? AoI will, by default, save your animations as a BUNCH of separate images. That's no fun, so we need a video editor to compile all the images into a video. If you don't have such software, here are some alternatives:
1. Install the Java Media Framework on your computer. If you don't know how to do that, please ask a friend or a teacher how to do it. With the JMF installed, and AoI restarted (I think), AoI will allow you to save your animations as .MOV files.
2. Install Linux and use a free video editor like Cinelerra to put the frames together and save the result to a video file.
3. Or install Linux or a Unix-derivative, and paste a command like this into your terminal window:
mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=320:h=240:fps=25:type=jpg -ovc lavc \
-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell -oac copy -o output.avi
This command will take a folder full of 320x240 pixel JPG files and convert them to a 25 frame-per-second "output.avi" video file. This requires that you have mencoder installed.
A follow-up command like:
mencoder output.avi -o output-with-sound.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -audiofile soundtrack.mp3
...will take an mp3 file called "soundtrack.mp3" (hopefully adjusted to fit the length of the animation) and combine it with your output.avi file to produce "output-with-sound.avi" ... which is then ready to upload to Youtube, or share with friends.
Rock out. See, that's even faster than using a video editor. ;-) |
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So, getting back to Art of Illusion...
Go to the "Scene" menu and click "Render Scene..." and you'll see the Rendering Options window. Change your values to match what I've got below: |
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So...we have a Youtube-default sized image of 320x240 (you can go much higher if you want more detail, or if you have a nice big monitor). We are viewing the animation through Camera 1. We are rendering a Movie that's 10 seconds long, at 25 frames per second.
Our antialiasing (making the graphics nice and smooth) is sset to Maximum 4/16, which is normal.
Click OK and AoI will ask you how it should output your video frames: |
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If you have the Java Media Framework installed, just change JPEG to "MOV." This will give you a video file rather than a bunch of still frames.
Otherwise, make the settings match mine and click OK! Now AoI wants to know where to save the files. I always make a new folder, so things don't get messy: |
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Select your folder (your file chooser will probably look different from mine) and click "OK." Then AoI will start rendering your rotating globe animation. |
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Spinning Earth Tutorial
Hourglass Tutorial
