#ANTIC CIS Support
5 messages in this thread
From what I gather, he avoids the format conversion problem by doing the
equivalent of Grabbit on animation frames. Whew! BTW – have you ever heard
of "snakes"? These are software objects that "cling" to image edges
(something like finite element analysis) and, because of their dynamic
nature can track animated digitized images, thus linearizing them (with all
the advantages that provides). 3d versions exist which use stereo pairs to
contort sphere-like meshes into the shape the object would be like (and
making a reasonable, low second derivitive attempt at the missing side…).
That is to say, the perfect 3d interface – a stereo Live + snakes. Think
about it. Note: A human is needed for the initial state, but it is
automatic from then on. Just in case you didn't have enough to do. ….. J
H H Lowengard
Yup, that's right, they wrote a sneaky backdoor to catch Movie switching
screens, and then they grab them and turn them to ANIMs.
I'd think these "snakes" would be great for monochrome images, but don't
forget the dithering and HAM colors of Amiga animations. They are difficult
to compress, period. Where could I find a reference about snakes?
I've only seen one reference to snakes, in a book of papers given at a
1987 visual language recognition conference, which I was browsing
through. something similar may be going on in Illustrator 88 for the Mac,
which can convert a (pixelized) mac paint picture into linearized
Postscript (which may then be tweaked). The problem is not so tough,
especially if you allow for human intervention and "taste". I'll see if I
can find the book again – it's not as if I hadn't though of something like
snakes before seeing the reference, but the 3-d aspect of it fascinated me.
Even Amy's 16-level grey scale would probably suffice. J H H Lowengard –
what? me go to a conference or sumpin' ?
I don't think Adobe Illustrator is being so smart as snakes. They have a
number of parameters you tweak to get better results on the autotrace, and
you end up with an object with a lot of bezier curves. That not bad,
necessarily…
They definitely don't use 'em – (I-'88, snakes ). Just to get back to the
thread subject, I gave a demo of Zoe at AMUSE last tuesday and showed off a
lot of its new capabilities (new as in officially released). If anyone at
ANTIC is listening, Pleeeeeze fix the memory bomb bug. It's embarassing,
although I structured my demo so as to create the bomb early in the show. I
can get out of it (by running the old Zoe…) but the less fortunate
customers cannot.
I observed als this interesting phenom. : I wrote a program whose sole
purpose is to grab some core (memory to you neophytes) and hang on to it
until the close box of its window is hit. The idea is to keep zoe'[s hands
off it until it has grabbed its memory, and then to release it for use by
fonts and cli programs (like format). This seems to cause a Zoe memory bomb
every time.
By memory bomb, i mean it GURUs right after loading a .RIF file. Some
memory management! I hope the ST version bombs more. ANyway, I'm doing a
very long animation in it featuring DPainted screens (for the smooth,
blended effects) in a number of .rifs to be spliced together. Lots and Lots
of fun. J H H Lowengard