[Squeakland] Animation, Onion-Skinning and Antialiased Graphics

[Bert Freudenberg]

Am 07.07.2006 um 21:35 schrieb Greg Smith:

> I just discovered EToys the other day and am thoroughly fascinated by
> its potential to possibly teach an old graphics guy, like me, how to
> program and express myself graphically/interactively/experimentally.
> I'm hoping the EToys environment will allow me to do this.

Welcome :)

> In messing around inside the EToys environment I could not readily
> see any evidence of antialiasing being present on the results of any
> of the painting tools.

This is true. The etoys drawing tools have been kept simple, both on  
purpose and because it's no small feat to rival professional drawing  
tools. The purpose is, for example, to allow for testing colors in a  
script, which would be hindered by smooth colors.

Beautiful graphics you should author externally and import. Also,  
many of the more advanced features of Squeak are not exposed at the  
etoy level. For example, we can directly import and play back Flash  
vector animations, but you need a programmer for that.

> I also discovered there didn't seem to be any
> support for the .png format with alpha channel for use as "sprites"
> for lack of a better term.

Set Squeak's display depth to 32 to enable alpha-compositing  (it's  
16 by default to save memory), and drag a PNG from the Finder into  
Squeak.

> Also, if really good animations are to be produced within the EToys
> environment, it will be necessary to have an untouchable set of
> layers that represent, at least, previous drawings in the animation,
> (onion skin).  I couldn't readily discover any such functionality.
> Is it possible within EToys?

When you make a new painting, a previous painting is visible behind  
the translucent white background of the paint tool.

- Bert -