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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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