What is Animorpher 1.0?

Animorpher will allow you to do animation and three dimensional morphing with Ray Dream Designer® 3.0.x. It takes two keyframes you create in Designer and calculates the between frames. You then render the frames using the Designer batch queue. Animorpher© is not a plug-in. It is a separate application that operates on Designer documents.

Some of the special effects you can create include:

1) Animation ( scaling, translation, rotation ) of objects, cameras, and lights
2) 3D Morphing ( dynamically changing the shape of freeform objects )
3) Shader animation ( color, transparency, highlights, etc. )
4) Animate other attributes of Designer® ( lighting effects, camera zoom, etc. )

2.0 How to use

1) Create and save any scene you want to animate using Designer. This first scene will be one end point (keyframe) for the animation.

2) Change the scene to reflect what you want to animate. For example, to have an object move from left to right in your animation, position the object on the left side in the first keyframe and on the right side in the second keyframe. Save the second scene under a different name than the first scene. This file is the other end point (keyframe) of your animation (note: make sure you read the section on one to one mapping).

3) Close the scenes or Quit Designer and double click Animorpher. Note: You can run Designer and Animorpher at the same time if you have enough memory. Leaving Designer open saves time since it takes a while to start up and quit.

Select the file containing the start point of your animation using the Open Keyframe ... command in the File menu. Select the file containing the endpoint of your animation using the Open Keyframe... command again. The window will display the differences in the two keyframes. Select the Save Animation... command from the File menu. You will be prompted with a standard file dialog where you type in the base name for the animation files. Animorpher will append a frame number on the end of this name for each animation frame. Animorpher will then ask you to enter the number of animation frames. The animation files are then written to your disk.

4) Quit Animorpher. Select the Batch Queue option in Designer. Add the animation files that Animorpher created to the batch queue and render them. You can use the settings... button in the batch queue to change the rendered frame size.  It is usually a good idea to render the first try at something small like 320 X 240 pixels. As the files are being rendered you will be able to see the results of your animation.

5) Convert your rendered PICT's to a movie. Use a movie making program that imports individual PICT files (several shareware programs are available on AOL) or Movie Converter© in Apple's Quicktime Starter Kit.

If you are using Movie Converter make sure you set the batch file naming parameters in Designer preferences to add a prefix not a suffix (available starting with version 3.0.4). This will preserve the filename ending in sequential numbers that Movie Converter requires.

 

Download Animorpher 1.0 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K

At least 2MB of free RAM

Mac OS 7.x - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II