Moho Forum

Oh wow, Genete posted a thread about animated brushes in Synfig, I remembered the old animbrushes from deluxe paint, then a weird thing happened in my brain.... not unusual I suppose, but....
if only......
Anyway here is my first bungled test using an animated brush in anime.


It's not what I expected or find close to satisfactory but it moves!
I shall try some more tests soon.
Anyone interested?

Is that the camera movement bug, animated noise, or an actual animated brush? If it's a real animated brush, how's it done?

Yup it's a real animated brush.
Last year I tried my hand at making an animated cursor for stardock.
The process was a mystery to me ( and I couldn't have that) anyway the brush is using the same method as cursors and animated UI's .
Its a string of separate png's strung together using AniUtil.exe that are rearranged into one long png.
I used a plain black and white version of the original.
Unfortunately. the brush, instead of looking something like this... ....
gets mutilated and turns into the cross hatching as seen in the smiley face.
Here is the output I used as the brush from AniUtil which I have taken the transparency out of and blurred, it's a hack job I know, but it was just a test.. ....
broken link
( looks a bit spooky out of context, sorry about that , its the spinning mode ( BUSY )of the above critter).
....anime loads and compresses in space all the frames to one image
which produced the cross hatched look, but somehow the extra data(whatever that is) makes the frames cycle is retained and read.
This was a long shot all along and I was surprised to see anything happen.
Still, even if this is a dead end, the cross hatched look is interesting and could be useful.
I think a little more experimentation might be on the cards, perhaps by someone with half a clue about this.


Oh yeah if you want the cursor it's smaller than the example, it's called microzoa by chuckeye (me)
http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx? ... 2&libid=25
or, but you'll have to get tha app from stardock (free)
Broken link

it does all sorts of stuff depending on your task , it will even start mitosis if left to its own devices and was made with anime.
I load it up with the old version-cursor xp not the new- cursor fx - freeware version.
I find the old one works better ,could be a registry issue on my own machine though.

The main thing with this cross hatched is that AS is not ready to read (and understand) that kind of png files. I think it is trying to show the entire sequence of joined images in a square box what produces a cross hatch. Why is is animating? I don't know. Maybe the hidden data is not properly written to be understood by AS?

Interesting trial chucky. In synfig you can use anything as a brush (an image or a complete animation) because brushes are created by a combination of duplicate layer and link to bline ability, so in fact that the brushes are animated is not a great new in synfig but the brushes themselves yes (because they're not a built in feature).

Good luck with this road.

The movement most likely is due to the fact that this is an "OS" type of effect. The OS is "animating" the png but AS doesn't really know what the heck it is so it "stretches" it as Genete pointed out.

It won't work for mac or linux I am guessing.

-vern

Unfortunately AS only recognizes PNG as brushes. In TVPaint I can even use animated GIFs as brushes.

There even was the MNG format specification (derived from PNG) intended to replace animated GIFs, but since it isn't supported anywhere it is completely abandoned and not part of any standard. The specs are there, but nearly no program can write or read it.

Anyway, I can't think of really many uses for an animated brush in AS, although I asked for a feature allowing to use multiple bitmaps in one brush myself. The effect will only be that of a wildly changing or even flickering outline, which is useful to only a handful of styles. An improvement which makes more sense would be the ability to animate line width on every point separately, but I can live comfortably without that.

I'm not sure that the sequence has any effect here, I think you'd get the same output if you'd just use one of these stars.
What I think is happening is that AS redraws the brushes for every frame so the effect is one of an animated or noisy line.
I think it's a bug, but I'm using it for an white noise effect.

Well, it looks like a lot of cold water has been poured on your idea, but I find it interesting! Could have some good applications for effects such as fire or water, as well as the strictly outline styles referred to by slowtiger. Thanks for sharing...

Yes it is a PNG, png's are used in animated cursors and UI's as I said before,
one of my earlier tests had a different image appearing in sequence around the edge of the shape.
Yes there is definitely a bug in there, would be great to be able to reign it in.
I'm not one to claim to have seen UFO's in the bathtub , please give me more credit than that .
Genete seems to understand what's happening quite clearly.

The animation was made in anime.
Some people just love to pour cold water on anyone, could be a sadistic domination thing
Feature request methinks, for whatever reason someone might need it.

I think it's cool as heck but I can't use it unless it is cross platform.

-vern

Hey Chucky. I looked into this a bit, and was wondering if you'd check something for me. Do you still get that animated brush if you check the 'minimize frame to frame randomness' box in the brush options?

If not it may be that AS is using the brush (crosshatched) that is adjacent to the one you've added, because it can't actually read your animated PNG.

Just some thoughts.

I'm using Ubuntu linux and AS PRO 5.6, when load your brush it simply crash:
Don't worry. It also crash with other custom brushes, with not funky dimensions.
Just for your info.

-G

Yikes, well looks like there's no way of tricking that brush system then.
It was interesting anyway,
Myth - busted