You could conceivably make dozens of different incarnations of one cast member, each for example a different size or place on the stage, each with its own score channel. these incarnations are called sprites, and they're the basic building blocks of Director animation.
Understanding
the role of sprites (and their potential) is a key step in working with Director.
When you place a sprite on the Stage by dragging a cast member to the Score, that sprite appears centered on the Stage. To achieve that nice balanced effect, Director has to calculate the physical center of the sprite as well as of the Stage. That is why every graphic cast member has a registration point, which you can see in the Paint window.
If you push the registration point
button, crosshairs appear to indicate where the registration point is. Just
drag the crosshairs to a desired point. This
point will be the center of the cast member.
Keyframing makes it easy to designate any point in a sprite segment as a keyframe. Auto-tweening enables Director to automatically "tween" (as in 'in between') the cells between keyframes to show any movement that should occur. In other words, with auto-tweening you can lengthen or shorten a sprite segment, and the motion of sprites within that segment will be compressed or extended accordingly.
With Space to Time you place all the necessary sprites in a single Score frame, arranging them in the form of the action. Once you're satisfied with the flow of the sequence, a single command converts the arrangement into a segment
suitable for playback.
The reverse sequence command will retain all of our sprite placement information but will simply flip the order within the segment.
Reverse sequence is a good tool for orchestrating exits: you can animate a cast member's entrance onto
the Stage, use
In-between to keep the cast member steady for any duration, and then paste the entrance animation and select
Reverse
Sequence to make the exit.
You can switch cast members corresponding to any sprite while retaining that sprite's placement information. Applying such a substitution to a segment of sprites effectively gives you the power to save the motion while changing the image.
Exchange Cast Members is an especially powerful tool, as it can allow you to build
your movie first and then refine
the graphic elements later.
We've already established that each sprite is an individual copy of a cast member. Well, ink effects can change the nature of that copy by dictating how it's drawn on the screen. The various "inks" are actually modes of display; some change the sprite's appearance radically, while others make subtle changes that show up only when one sprite interacts with another.
draft version 0.5 (12/3/2001)
You'll
create a sense of animation either by changing the sprite position from cell to cell or by switching one
sprite for another.
Sprites are usually refered to by the number of the channel they occupy. Changes to the sprite
don't affect its source cast
member, but changes made to that cast member will be reflected in all sprites derived
from it.
Registration point
Alway remember when you're working on the Cast level, keep in mind that your changes
here affect all sprites!
Keyframing and auto-tweening
Space to Time animation
Reversing sequence
Switching cast members
Ink effects
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