Express Animator

Awesome Animator (formerly Express Animator)
Stable release Awesome Animator (10.03) / September 20, 2010
Operating system Windows
Type Animation Creator
License Proprietary EULA
Website www.awesomeanimator.com

Awesome Animator (formerly Express Animator) is a software program for making animations, primarily Flash animations for websites.[1] It is similar to Adobe's Flash MX software but has additional features such as skeletal animation and exporting to Silverlight and HTML5 Canvas. The latest version supports Actionscript 2.0 and 3.0 scripting. It is of the genre of vector based graphics programs in that it stores the coordinates of the shapes vertices. The shapes are filled with either colours, gradients, or bitmaps. The program was re-launched in 2010 as 'Awesome Animator' with many changes from the original program such as allowing more complex scripts, an improved renderer and various 'wizards' to speed up tasks such as creating buttons and charts.

Skeletal Animation

Awesome Animator features skeletal animation which is a way of linking together shapes such as arms or legs so that can be animated like a puppet. This allows the user to create moveable characters.

Tweening

The primary method of animation is that of tweening. This means that the user specifies the position, orientation and colour of the first and last frames of an animation and the computer fills in all the intermediate positions.[2]

Morphing

Awesome Animator features morphing (also called shape tweening) which allows the user to animate smooth transformations between two shapes.

Import and Export Formats

Awesome Animator imports and exports media files in several formats to various extents. The main ones are:

Format File Extension Extent
Flash Animations SWF Imports and exports animations, Flash, sound, FLV video, fully featured.
Windows Video AVI Exports and renders animations to video with sound. Imports windows AVI files as series of bitmaps.
Silverlight XAML Exports one frame only
Scalable Vector Graphics SVG Exports one frame.

Import, compatible with about 99% of SVG images in the Open Clip Art Library.

Portable Document Format PDF Exports frames as pages of e-book.
Encapsulated Postscript EPS Exports one frame.
Bitmap formats BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF Exports and renders single frames or several frames as separate bitmaps.

Imports images into the animation.

Animated GIFs GIF Imports animated GIFS which are imported as movieclips composed of separate bitmaps. Exports animations as animated GIFs of any size.
Windows Metafile EMF Exports one frame to Windows Enhanced Metafile format.
Flash Video FLV Imports Flash Video into application for output in SWF files.
Windows Audio WAV Imports Windows sound files for use in animations.

Also imports of one track of MIDI files for inbuilt synthesizer.

Motion Capture BVH Imports motion capture files
HTML5 Canvas HTML Exports animations using the HTML5 Canvas tag and JavaScript, so it works in Safari on iOS (and many other browsers)

Scripting

The scripting is based on Actionscript however there are some differences/short cuts such as instead of using the syntax on(EnterFrame){...} this is done through choosing the menu item "on Enter Frame".

Actionscript 2.0/3.0

Awesome Animator supports most of the Actionscript 2.0 syntax and also has a built-in Actionscript interpreter. Since 2011 it also has Actionscript 3.0 support including importing of AS3 classes. It has both a parser and compiler which can read actionscript from SWF files. It displays the methods and variables of a class in a tree-structure instead of textually.

Wizards

One notable feature of Awesome Animator is the quick menu which has a selection of wizards (dialog boxes) which allows users to create such things as animated text, buttons and charts very quickly. It also has a selection of pre-built and pre-rigged characters such as a human, crocodile, chicken and cow.

iOS support

Awesome Animator has a feature which allows you to export the animations in the HTML5 Canvas format. The Safari browser on iOS (iPhone and iPad) can't play Flash animations but it does support HTML5 Canvas graphics and animations.

No recent updates

Version 10.5 was issued in 2010 but has not appear to have undergone any further updates or upgrades. It could be that development has stalled, just as did its predecessor 'Express Animator'. The program is stable but is clearly in need of further refinement. (e.g.: such as being able to rename layers and have more control over editing).

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Description of Awesome Animator". Archived from the original on 2011-02-02.
  2. ↑ "W3 description of tweening". Archived from the original on 2011-02-02.
Motion graphics and animation software
2D 3D
Open-source
Closed-source Freeware
Commercial
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