Animation Master 2.0.5 — conceived as an in-house production tool by the creators of the California Raisins — specializes in character animation, and is priced reasonably enough to attract budding Disneys. Although it packs extraordinary power, Animation Master is needlessly difficult to learn and prone to instability. Plus it’s saddled with the look-and-feel of Windows.
Animation Master has seven modules — Sculpture, Character, Materials, Decal, Action, Direction, and Render — for building and texturing models, animating them, and rendering final images.
Sculpture, a spline-based modeler, can produce complex, organically shaped objects. In Sculpture you can extrude and lathe spline objects into more complex shapes, and a quick-shade button lets you preview contours. In the Character module, you can assemble separate elements, such as arms, torsos, and heads, into complete, hierarchically organized models. It also lets you apply surface attributes, such as transparency and specularity, and edit surfaces to produce bump and reflection effects. You create and edit procedural textures with the Materials module, and Decal lets you apply bitmapped images that stretch and flex with object motion.
The Action module is a key-frame animator that links objects with spline backbones to produce realistic, coordinated movement. It can also morph an object’s surface mesh to create flexing-skin effects. Final scene construction takes place in Direction, where you can add lighting and determine camera angles. The Render module produces 24-bit ray-traced images in PICT, QuickTime, and TARGA formats.
Every object and texture can be associated with a channel for controlling the rate of motion or surface transformations. You can correlate channels to any part of a model, including individual surface points, to create subtle effects like a character’s breathing or muscles rippling.
To produce an animation, you transfer models from one module to another. Given enough RAM, you can run all seven modules simultaneously. However, Animation Master doesn’t support publish and subscribe, so you must push the models through the pipeline by saving them in each module and reopening them in the others after every edit.
To use Animation Master efficiently, you need to learn its interface and its unique keyboard commands. Instead of movable tool palettes, the modules have fixed palettes holding tools, buttons, and numeric-entry boxes — lots of functions right at hand, but visually cluttered. And tools are not always logically arranged.
Animation Master is not forgiving. Support for undo, for example, is spotty at best. And its file organization is pathname driven; this Windows holdover means the program does not recognize its own files if they are not in a project folder. Worse, if you rename any folder, the program makes you rebuild the path before it can recognize its files. All the error messages will remind you of why you bought a Mac in the first place.
I could go on, but you get the picture — Animation Master exhibits many of the shortcomings common to in-house applications. It takes perseverance to tackle the steep learning curve, and patience to put up with the system crashes.
Don’t expect help from the manual — it’s written for the Windows version but peppered with references to Macintosh, Amiga, and Silicon Graphics platforms. Mostly, you read the Windows sections and translate. Plus, it’s equally inadequate on topics both simple and sophisticated. A tutorial video is included, but it covers only basic functions; the optional five-volume video tutorial is better.
The Last Word
Animation Master offers powerful modeling and animation tools at a reasonable price, and affordability sometimes makes up for a multitude of sins. On that score, Animation Master may merit your attention, but go in with your eyes wide open.
Martinez, Carlos Domingo. (October 1994). Animation Master. Macworld. (pgs. 65, 67).
Hash Inc.
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animationmaster_208.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
