Learning Kinemac 1 – Getting to know the stage

Kinemac is a powerful animation tool.  For those of us with little experience, but lots of ideas, getting to know Kinemac can be overwhelming.  This series of tutorials will help you work through the processes of gaining an understanding of how each of the parts come together to create great animations.  If you’ve watched the Mac Mediacast Kinemac Tutorials, and found yourself need to pause and try[1], you may need to move slowly through the interface and options.  Luckily, there is a transcript of the tutorial at the above link.  These tutorials will complement Mac Mediacast’s tutorials by providing a slower, more leisurely, introduction.

Get to know Kinemac

The Kinemac web site has a great support/help site to explain the interface to Kinemac.  This is very useful for individuals who have some experience with animation already, and for whom, Kinemac is just another tool in their toolbox, albeit a very powerful and relatively simple tool.  For these people, the page, creating an animation, explains everything needed.  For some of us, it raises more questions than it answers.  The tutorial below elaborates Kinemac’s tutorial to help orient a beginning animator to the power of Kinemac.  Work through Kinemac’s tutorial, then try the activity below or, for the less adventurous, try the activity below then go to Kinemac’s tutorial.

Starting

Open Kinemac.  Kinemac automatically opens a new stage.  This is the animation space – the place where all the activity happens.  The main parts are the stage window, the inspector panel (on the right) and the sprites window (at the bottom).  If there is only the stage window, press command+2 for the sprites window and command+4 for the inspector window.  You can keep these grouped by pressing command+ctrl+1.  All of these windows are listed in the Window menu.  We’ll meet the Bezier and the Textures windows in later tutorials.

The Grid

If you select Show Grid from the View menu (press ‘G’), the grid appears with three coloured arrows.  The coloured arrows represent

• Red = X axis – Points to Right (positive values – like a 2D graph)
• Green = Y axis – Points to Top (positive values (up) – like a 2D graph)
• Blue = Z axis – Points to Front (positive values – getting closer to the viewer)

You can view a single view or 4 views from the View menu (press “/”).  For this exercise, go to 4 views to see the object moving in each dimension simultaneously.

Moving an object around on the stage.

To get a feel for how objects move about in the space, create an object as indicated by creating an animation, then, reset the position to 0, 0, 0 in position section of the Geometry tab of the Inspector panel.  This will place the object in the very centre of the screen. Make sure the top left view is set to ‘Front’ in the View menu (press “F”).  Kinemac takes the values you enter at each keyframe as a point of reference and constructs the movement path between those two points.  To set up an animation, use the following values for your keyframe locations, positions and rotations.

1. Using your mouse, move the object to the top left corner.  Set a keyfame at zero ticks (click where the green marker is above the ruler when the counter display shows 0000000) then set its position to approximately -1000, 1000, -1000. Using precise values will help you learn the size of the stage.
2. Move to your next keyframe (at 200 ticks – counter displays 0000200). Provided no slider value is selected, you can tab between keyframes once they are set.
3. Move the object to the top right corner.  Set your keyframe position approximately 1000, 1000, -1000.  Set the rotation keyframe to 180, 180, 180 to rotate the object.
4. Move to your next keyframe (at 400 ticks – counter displays 0000400).
5. Move the object to the bottom right corner, keyframe position approximately 1000, -1000, -1000.  Set the rotation keyframe to 360, 360, 360.
6. Move to your next keyframe (at 600 ticks – counter displays 0000600).
7. Move the object to the bottom left corner, keyframe position -1000, -1000, -1000.  Set the rotation keyframe to 540, 540, 540.
8. Move to your next keyframe (at 800 ticks – counter displays 0000800).
9. Move the object back to the top left corner, keyfame Position approximately -1000, 1000, -1000. Set the rotation to 720, 720, 720.
10. Hit the space bar to play.

This moves the object around the front of the stage, so we’re not really using the 3D power of Kinemac yet (although we’ve implemented the 4th dimension of timing).  Watching how the object moves around in the space will help orient you to working with a sprite and keyframes.

You can also change the size of the object at any of the keyframes (or at other points by defining new keyframes for size) by changing the values in the size section of the Geometry tab of the Inspector panel.

Experiment with the X,  and Y positions and rotation at keyframe points to see the full effect of the movement on the stage.

Set the camera back to Default Static Camera on the View menu (press “D”) to see the effect of camera position.  You may have to zoom out to see the whole animation.

In the next tutorial, we will start investigating the Z axis or the depth of the field of view.

Enjoy!

1. then scratch your head, rewind, pause, try, look confused, pause, try, give up [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 10:30 pm and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.