My animated tile experiments continue. Even though I’m designing in color, I had to make this animated gif small and black-and-white to fit within WordPress’s 2MB upload limit.
I am very pleased with how this is going.
Morphing Tiles
Category: Animation
Animating Islamic Tiles Turned Out To Be Easier Than I Thought
I had assumed animating Islamic tiles would be a big complicated endeavor but it only took a few hours of messing around in Flash to figure it out. I just made a half-equilateral-triangle mask and tiled it, then made a fairly simple animation underneath:
Obviously all kinds of variations can be made from here. If only I had tried this earlier!
The reason this is a Big Deal for me, is I didn’t know how easy it would be to tile squares with hexagons. I thought if I made a hex-based system like this I’d just get hexagons and equilateral triangles, not squares. But look – there are squares all over the place!
It’s 2013. Do you know where my Free vector animation software is?
In 2008 I vowed that the only animation software I’d switch to, once I had to give up Macromedia Flash 8, would be Free software. Why? Because Adobe bought Flash and ruined it. Among their other unforgivable crimes was crippling Quicktime video output. Old Macromedia Flash could export to any video codec Quicktime supported, including the luscious and useful “Animation” codec. Adobe removed high quality output options to force users to process .swf files through After Effects. I could have lived with the insult and expense of being forced to buy After Effects, but not of having my workload and production time increased just so Adobe could try to squeeze more money out of its customers.
Now it’s 2013 and I’m still using the same copy of Macromedia Flash 8 from 2005, on an old Mac that supports OS 10.5, because old Flash doesn’t work on newer computers or newer operating systems. I’m frozen in time, and it’s starting to hurt.
5 years have passed and there’s no viable Free vector animation software for me to switch to. Synfig supposedly can do all sorts of wonderful things, but it’s simply not useable by anyone not actually developing the software. I devoted quite a bit of time and effort trying to switch, even getting a devoted Linux box for it; it didn’t suck from lack of effort on my part. That said, I do trust that the problem is with the user interface, not the back end; existing Synfig could conceivably serve as a starting point for making some really good software I could actually use.
Whether it’s a massive Synfig UI overhaul, or something new built from scratch, I need a good, Free vector animation program to switch to. I’m talking Free as in Freedom. It’s not the price of the software that puts me off. I’d pay to switch to ToonBoom, for example, if I thought it would be reliable. But no proprietary software is reliable. At any time its “owners” can cripple it and otherwise screw over their customers, in pursuit of whatever misguided business model they fancy at the time. It’s not the loss of my good money I can’t tolerate, it’s the loss of ALL MY WORK. Meanwhile the world moves on, new file formats and codecs are developed, and whether my work is compatible with progress remains at the mercy of my software’s corporate overlords. Even now I can’t export my Flash illustrations as .svg files; SVG wasn’t in demand when Macromedia released Flash 8, and because Flash is proprietary no one can add an SVG export feature to it now.
I need vector animation software I can use in the years and decades to come, that can grow with the times, and allow the future access to the work I do today.
What else do I need? Things like Flash 8*:
Mac compatible (I’m a pragmatist, not a purist)
Timeline similar to Flash 8
Visible audio waveform in timeline
“Symbol” grammar, where symbols can be animated and nested
good vector drawing tools
expansive video export options
resolution independent
and things Flash 8 doesn’t have, but should:
parent-child registration points
“bones”(maybe – aww, who cares)custom vector strokes (beyond just dotted and dashed lines)
SVG export
fewer bugs 😉
Time alone has not made this elusive software come into being. Could money? How much would I have to raise to commission an excellent programmer or two to give me what I want? Should I try a Kickstarter? A project like this should have a million dollars; I would aim for one tenth of that. Would even $100,000 be possible?
The result would be excellent Free vector animation software for everyone in the world.
If that doesn’t work I’m going to have to switch to some other proprietary software for the near future. That would be very disappointing. But I can’t stay in 2005 forever.
*What I don’t need is anything related to .swf files or the Flash Player or ActionScript. Almost all of Flash’s development since Flash 5 has been around “interactivity” and “web delivery”- things professional animators don’t use. If only we could separate the animation production part of Flash, from the “web player” part! The former has been almost perfect from the beginning, the latter has become a bloated monster that needs to die.
Generic Goddess
Ancient Egyptian painting designs look a bit like cut-out animations already, yet it’s taken me until now to actually make a cut-out human figure and move it around. No fancy animation techniques here, just a test of whether the pieces hold together in different positions. They do, I think.
More Wadjets
If I were good at coding, I’d write something that would help me generate these snake movements. As it is, I do a lot of tedious moving-around-of-frames by hand. It took several hours of manual shifting to make this vertical Wadjet. I also made a more squiggly one, below; I like the shape but I think she might be a little too active.
Snake shedding its skin
While trying to improve Wadjet’s snake movements, this little cycle happened. It’s just part of the experimental process.