ANIMATION TECHNOLOGY

Animation Tips

Intoduction

Animation is all the rage on the web and is becoming more popular every day. But before you begin to create animations for your web site or multimedia application, you need to consider some basic questions, such as: What is its purpose? What kind of audience do you want to attract? What are you trying to say/promote? Will the animation add interest to your site or detract from it?

Animation Tips

Below are animation tips designed to help you make clear decisions about animation aesthetics, implementation, storyboarding and optimization, without sacrificing quality. These tips, while aimed at 3D, can also be applied 2D animations.

Placement Before you even begin to create animations, there are several important aesthetic issues to take into account. To elaborate, a single animation on a web page will overwhelm all static images, so placement is important. As mentioned above, make sure that the animation is beneficial to your web site, otherwise you will lose your audience. Looping Before you place a finished animation on your web site or multimedia application, be aware that if you have more than one animation on a single page, the effect can overwhelm the viewer and turn them off, rather than draw them in. Also, animations that cycle endlessly can quickly become annoying. Design your animation with a finite number of loops, so that it eventually stops
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Storyboard Once you've decided to create an animated sequence, you need to start with the fundamentals. Of these, a crucial step is the creation of the storyboard. Here, you detail the animation in a precise fashion with sketches, scripts, transitions, timing, etc. It is with the storyboard that you can work out many creative difficulties. And once youve finished the storyboard, you have, in a sense, created the animation. Keep in simple A key issue in storyboard design is complexity, which was a common problem encountered by many students. Often, they would design animations that were beautiful in theory, but impossible to complete in the time available. Whenever possible, keep it simple. If necessary, you can always add detail later.
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File size This will reduce file sizes and is useful for gamers. If youre using a 2D application to create your shapes (such as Adobe Illustrator, or the Corel KPT 6 plug-in), these applications offer a command to reduce the number of points in a path. Finally, when placing an animation on your web site, give the viewers an idea of the file size so they can determine if they want to watch it or not. This is especially important for users with slower modems.

Detail When working in 3D, reduce geometric complexity for objects that are further away in a scene. At a distance, such detail is not likely to be discernable by the eye. When objects are in motion, the eye is not able to discern information one would normally see in a still image and is much more forgiving. This means that details can be further reduced.

Complexity In 3D applications, lines and facets can appear on an object that points away from the viewer. Turning these off reduces image complexity and rendering time. Also, turning off anti-aliasing will speed up rendering. The down side is that the edges will appear jagged, but this may not affect your animation. Points As with vector images, it's important to reduce the number of points and not to rely totally on geometry alone to define create an object. A better option is make use of image maps, which create the illusion of geometry while reducing the file size. One note of caution: be careful how you use image maps, as they can bloat your file sizes as well. Until the bandwidth issue is resolved, keep file sizes as small as possible. This issue becomes even more important when you consider that many users still use 56.6Kbps modems.
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Compressing One method for compressing image maps or bitmaps is "Weighted Optimization," available in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe ImageReady. Weighted Optimization uses an alpha channel to vary compression settings across an image. For areas where quality is important, you use a lower compression, and in areas such as sky, you use a higher compression. The end result is an image of a small size but certain areas are of a high quality. Weighted Optimization gives you control over GIF dithering, lossy GIF settings and JPEG compression

The above tips will help you make wise decisions about animation aesthetics, implementation, storyboarding and optimization, without sacrificing quality.

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