[Squeakland] Animation, Onion-Skinning and Antialiased Graphics

Bert Freudenberg bert at impara.de
Sat Jul 8 12:26:59 PDT 2006


Rotating and scaling an image does not preserve the alpha channel, it  
gets pixelated. But right after dropping into Squeak it should look  
fine. If not, could you attach a small sample PNG?

For animating, put the frames in a holder and cycle. Have a look at  
"Sam's Face Ball" project here:

	http://www.squeakland.org/school/elementary.html

- Bert -

Am 08.07.2006 um 19:48 schrieb Greg Smith:

> Bert:
>
> Thanks for your assistance and direction.  I succeeded in dragging  
> in a .png file with alpha channel, after setting the EToys display  
> to 32bit.  Works nicely, except I noticed that my finely  
> antialiased .png image got more pixelated around the edges.  Even  
> when sizing it smaller within EToys the phenomenon persists.   
> Probably not anything I can do about it.
>
> How about importing a sequence of .png images with alpha to produce  
> an animation, is this possible?  If not, could you elaborate on the  
> method for producing animation within EToys?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg Smith
>
>
> On Jul 7, 2006, at 3:00 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
>> 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 -
>>




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