Getting Started
with VNS 2 Part 2B.
Animation Basics
29. To save a series of OpenGL
frames to disk, open the Main camera view popup menu and
select Make Quick Sequence.
30. Move to the WCSFrames folder, name the sequence Main,
and Save.
31. The animation will play slowly
in the camera view and the Status window will show the
Quick Sequence progress as the frames are saved.
32. After VNS is finished, go
up to the menu and select View > View Image >
From Disk.
33. The View Image File
requester will open in WCSFrames,
the last folder we were in. There will be 600 numbered Main frames:
20 seconds at 30 frames per second. We'll use a separate application
to assemble the frames into an animation. I'm going to use QuickTimePro.
It's an inexpensive tool with a great feature set.
34. Launch QuickTimePro
and select File > Open Image Sequence.
35. Navigate to your WCSFrames folder and open the first Main bitmap,
Main0001.bmp. On a Mac the frames will be in the PIC image
format.
36. Choose 30 frames per second
from the Frame rate dropdown in Image Sequence Settings.
37. Click Ok to import
the frame sequence.
38. To save the movie, choose
File > Export.
39. Name the movie MainOpenGL.
We could use the default settings, but they're not very appropriate
for animation. Select Options.
40. This will open the Movie
Settings window. Click Settings.
41. Choose the Animation
compressor, Thousands of Colors, Best Quality,
and 30 frames per second.
42. OK out of the Movie Settings window.
43. Save the movie.
44. When QuickTime finishes exporting
the movie, open it to see the assembled OpenGL sequence. It's
on the Tutorial
1 CD in the animation
folder.
45. The camera path looks good,
so we're ready to continue. It's a good idea to preview your
camera moves this way before committing to long render times
later on.
46. What if we want the 20
second animation to cover 10 seconds? That's where Scale
Key Frames  comes
in. One place to access it is from the Animation Toolbar, to
the left of the Add and Remove Key Frames buttons.
47. Since Main Camera Longitude
is still active and we're in Group mode, the Scale
Key Frames window opens up ready to scale the camera position
group.
48. In the Key Frames section,
scale All Frames to the range from 0 to 10
seconds. Click Operate to scale the frames.
49. If we go back to time 0 by
entering it into the frame counter, the Next keyframe
button jumps us to 10 seconds, not 20.
50. Let's access Scale Keyframes
from the Camera Editor this time. Select Animation Operations
next to any of the position parameters in the Main Camera Editor and select Scale Keyframe(s).
51. To scale the animation back
to 20 seconds, choose All Frames, enter an upper range
value of 20 seconds, and Operate.
52. Return to time 0, jump to
the next keyframe at 20 seconds, and we're back where we started.
53. Let's change the camera path
midway through the animation. Enter 10 into the frame
counter and Enter to jump to 10 seconds.
54. Select one of the Main
camera position parameters in the Scene-At-A-Glance to activate the camera, if it isn't already active.
55. Enable Move Mode and
drag the camera south of its current position. Drop the elevation
to 2000 meters.
56. Create a key.
57. Save the project, go back
to the beginning, and play the animation. It looks like we dropped
the elevation too much because we're flying through the ridge.
58. To see what this looks like
graphically, let's open the elevation Timeline from another
useful window we haven't used yet. Select the Animation Track View 
from the Animation Toolbar.
59. The Animation Track View
lists all animated items in the project. Expand the Cameras
category and Main Camera to see the position parameters
we've keyframed. Follow the Camera Elevation track right
and Open Timeline  .
60. Let's remove the Main Camera
Elevation we just keyframed.
61. Select
the key at 10 seconds and Delete Point.
62. Keep your changes
and close out the Animation
Track View. We still
have latitude and longitude keyframes at 10 seconds, so use Animation
Operations to Delete Key(s).
63. We're in Key Frame Group
mode, so it defaults to operate on the Main Camera Latitude
Group, which is what we want. Select Single Frame
at 10 seconds and Operate. This will return us
to the original camera path with keyframes at 0 and 20
seconds. Save the project.
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