This manual, as well as the software described in it, is furnished under license and may only be used or copied
in accordance with the terms of such license. The information in this manual is furnished for informational use
only, is subject to change without notice, and does not represent product specifications or commitment on the
part of Zaxwerks. Zaxwerks assumes no responsibility or liability for any error or inaccuracies that may appear
in this document.
The Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator is a trademark of Zaxwerks Inc. After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop are trademarks of Adobe Systems Inc. FreeHand is a trademark of Macromedia Inc. Apple and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Windows 2000 and Windows XP are registered trademarks of
Microsoft, Inc. OpenGL is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. All other product names or trademarks are the
property of their respective owners.
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide2
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide13
Introduction
This user guide covers the ProAnimator and the ProModeler software.
The ProModeler is used for creating 3D models and rendering still (single) images. The ProAnimator is used for creating
3D models, animating them and rendering movies. The two programs are very similar. If you took the ProModeler and
added an animation window you would have the ProAnimator.
This user guide is divided into four major sections. The first section is a series of tutorials on how to create animations
with the ProAnimator.
The second section breaks down and explains the animation capabilities, feature by feature.
The third section is a series of tutorials on text creation, logo creation, surface coloring, manipulating the objects, moving
the camera, setting up lights and finally rendering. These features are the same in both the ProModeler and the
ProAnimator. Since these features are nearly identical in both programs, the word ProAnimator is used to talk about the
software. However if you have the ProModeler just understand that we are talking about your program too. When there
are differences in the way the two programs work, these differences will be noted in the text.
The fourth section breaks down and explains each feature for modeling, surface coloring, object and camera manipulation,
and lighting.
For further assistance we have additional resources on our Web site: www.Zaxwerks.com. These include a User Forum,
Troubleshooting page, and a list of Frequently Asked Questions.
Have loads of fun with your new program! The Invigorator ROCKS!
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide14
Installation Instructions
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System Requirements
System Requirements - MACINTOSH
- G3 Power Mac (G4 recommended)
- Mac OS 9.1, 10.1 or 10.2.6.
- Apple’s OpenGL system extension
- QuickTime 5 or 6.1
- Color monitor capable of displaying at least
1024 x 768 in Millions of colors
- 128 MB RAM, (256 MB recommended)
- 100MB unused hard-disk space
- CD ROM drive
Software specifications subject to change without notice. Software used under license.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Refer to the Zaxwerks End User License for more information.
System Requirements - WINDOWS
- Intel Pentium III or 4 processor
- Windows 2000 or Windows XP Pro or Home Edition
- OpenGL system .dll file
- QuickTime 5 or 6.1
- Color monitor capable of displaying at least
1024 x 768 in True color
- 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended)
- 100MB unused hard-disk space
- CD ROM drive
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide16
Installing the Software
The Invigorator does not use an automatic installer. You only
need to do one step to install the software.
If you are installing from a CD...
1- Find the ProAnimator (or ProModeler) folder on the CD and
drag it into the Applications folder on your main hard drive.
If you are installing from a downloaded file...
1- Unstuff or Unzip the download, then drag the ProAnimator
(or ProModeler) folder into the Applications folder on your
main hard drive.
TROUBLESHOOTING TIP!
The ProAnimator/ProModeler folder contains many files
and folders. DO NOT touch the contents of the main folder.
Drag ONLY the ProAnimator/ProModeler folder to the
Applications folder and all these other files and folders will
be moved to the Applications folder too.
You are now ready to launch the program and create your first
Invigorator project. Open the Applications folder, then open the
ProAnimator or ProModeler folder, and double click on the
program icon.
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Fill in all fields then click the OK button.
Entering An Authorization Code For The First Time
The first time you launch the software it will ask you to enter
some information. Type your Name and Organization, and type
the Authorization Code exactly as it was given to you. Then press
the OK button.
A Temporary Code looks like this: A1234-B1234. A Permanent
Code looks like this: IPMS30-A1234-B1234-C1234 A Temporary
Code lasts for 30 days to give you time to contact Zaxwerks and
register the software. Once registered, Zaxwerks will give you a
permanent authorization code. (See the next section for infor-
mation on how to enter a permanent code.)
If you already have a Permanent Code there is no need to enter
the Temporary Code first. Type the Permanent Code when you
see the Authorization window and you’ll be ready to go.
TROUBLESHOOTING TIP !
On some Windows systems you may have trouble typing
into the Authorization Window. If this is the case, open a
program such as NotePad and type the information there.
Then copy and paste the information, one line at a time,
into the Authorization window.
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Demo Mode
If you don’t have either a Temporary or a Permanent Authorization Code you can run the program in Demo Mode by clicking the
DEMO button at the bottom of the authorization window. Demo
mode adds a watermark to the renderings and also limits the
program in some ways, but other than that most everything
works. Demo mode lets you get an idea of how the program runs
so you can see how fast and easy it is.
Entering A Permanent Authorization Code
(If this is the first time you have run the software see the
previous section titled: Entering An Authorization Code For
The First Time.)
If you have been running the software using a Temporary Authorization Code, double click on the program icon to launch it. You
will see a message window saying how many days you have left
to run the program. At the bottom of this message window will
be a “Register” button. Click the “Register” button then enter
your Permanent Authorization Code.
A Permanent Code looks like this: IPAS30-A1234-B1234-C1234
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How To Get A Permanent Authorization Code
A Permanent Authorization code is sent to you directly from
Zaxwerks. Contact Zaxwerks in one of the following ways:
Register by email: register@zaxwerks.com
Register online: www.zaxwerks.com/Register_English.html
Register by phone: 1-800-549-0250
You will be asked for your Temporary Authorization Code and
your contact information so you can receive notices about bug
fixes and updates.
Click this link on the Zaxwerks Home page to
get to the registration page.
If you bought the program directly from Zaxwerks you will have
received a green Invoice/Receipt with the Permanent codes
printed on stickers at the bottom.
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Basic Concepts
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BASIC CONCEPTS
The Invigorator creates its own models and images. It does not
process existing footage to give it a “3D effect”. You create
models that have depth and size, arrange them in space, and then
take pictures of them.
The Invigorator is a true 3D program, but it has differences that
make it unique from any other 3D program. There is a tremendous amount of technology and workflow design packed into this
program, in order to make it easier to learn and faster to use.
If you are new to creating 3D graphics here is a short overview of
the steps involved:
Modeling
The Invigorator creates models out of Adobe Illustrator files and
fonts installed on your computer. Models can be modified using
the controls in the Object Tab. A selection of over 100 preset
edge profiles come built into the program or you can make your
own. You can also import models created in other programs.
DEFINITIONS
Modeling
The creation of the objects and adjustment of
their shape.
Surface Set-Up
The paint job that is applied to the surface of
the objects. Often called “Surfacing”.
Scene Set-Up
The positioning of the objects and lights within
the 3D scene and the positioning of the
camera which views the scene and takes the
picture.
Animation
Moving the objects or camera over time.
Rendering
Creation of the final 3D image or movie.
“Taking the picture”.
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Surface Set-Up
Animation
The Invigorator has a completely unique way of handling
surfaces. Up to six different materials can be applied to
each object and those materials can be used in a variety of
ways. Once you try it you will see how the Invigorator has
finally given artists the tools to create a new generation of
3D title and logo graphics. Graphics like you have never
seen before.
Scene Set-Up And Lighting
Setting up a 3D scene has been streamlined to make it
easier for 2D graphic artists to make the jump to 3D. A
scene can have as many objects as you need and objects or
groups of objects can be rotated and positioned independently. Up to six lights can be used, and once you get your
lights perfect they can be saved and reused in future
projects.
Object manipulation within the 3D scene is done in a way
that’s completely new. Single and multiple objects can be
manipulated with speed and fluidity. There are a full
compliment of short cut keys. Even nudge keys are
supported.
Animation is created in a new way that is visual rather than
technical. Feedback is continuous so you can watch the
animation as you edit it. There is no need to stop and
render a preview.
Rendering
The rendering engine is designed for the rigors of professional production. It creates beautiful images of any
resolution with excellent antialiasing, image mapping, soft
shadows, transparencies for glass and chrome effects.
Images and movies come with alpha channels for compositing without the need to key the source footage.
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Animation
Tutorials
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ProAnimator Introduction
Hello and welcome to the world of the Invigorator ProAnimator!
The ProAnimator is different than any other animation program.
Other animation programs make you fiddle with things like
keyframes and velocity curves. The more objects you are animating the more keyframes you have to fiddle with. Projects can get
very complicated very quickly.
The ProAnimator, on the other hand creates animations in a new
and unique way. The creation of an animation is more like
directing a movie. The user is freed to create and design rather
than be forced into the roll as technician. Start to finish is only a
few steps and animating one object or 50 is the same amount of
work.
There are several ways to create your animation. The first we’ll
look at is how to use a preset to make the entire animation in just
a few clicks.
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Beginning Tutorials
Creating An Animation In Five Clicks
Our first project will show you how fast it is to create an animation from start to finish using the presets supplied with the
software.
TROUBLESHOOTING TIP: You must have installed the
program properly for the factory presets to be present. If
the TRY button doesn’t do anything or you don’t see any
presets in the menus when doing the following project, you
must quit and reinstall the program following the installation instructions.
1- Double click the ProAnimator icon to launch the program.
2- When you see four large buttons click the “Create 3D Text”
button.
3- Type the words News Update. Then click the OK button.
The flat text will be turned into 3D models automatically. You
will now see many pictures of Object Styles on the right side of
the main window. An Object Style is a snapshot of all the settings
for creating an object’s “Look”.
Type the words that will become 3D.
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4- Click on the top right Object Style (the blue and white one).
Hold your mouse button down and then drag to the left. As you
drag you will see a dotted rectangle moving along with the mouse
cursor. When the tip of the mouse is over one of the text letters
let up on the mouse button.
You will see that all of your letters have turned blue and white.
This “click down - hold - drag to position - and let up” procedure
is called “Drag and Drop”. Drag and Drop can be done with many
things inside the ProAnimator.
Below the main window is another window which may be
partially hidden if your monitor isn’t big enough to hold them
both. Click once on the lower window to bring it to the front.
This window is called the Animation window.
5- At the top of the Animation window find the first red button
labled “TRY”. It is next to the button labled “Object Animations”.
Click it once.
Watch as an animation is constructed before your eyes. The
timeline will get several colored bars in “Object Track 1”, the
objects will jump to new positions, and the animation will play
back over and over.
That’s it. You’ve just created a complete 3D animation, and did
the whole thing in five mouse clicks!
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide
Drag and Drop an Object Style to color the letters.
Click TRY to auto-create an animation.
The colored bars represent the animation.
29
Click the Stop button to halt playback of the animation.
To experiment with other animations click the “TRY” button
again. Each time you click TRY a new animation will be constructed using the text you typed.
Stop the playback of your animation by clicking the Stop button
and continue on to the next exercise.
Changing The Text In An Animation
Once you have created an animation you can change the text
without having to redo any other work.
1- Stop the animation if you haven’t already done so.
2- Click on the main Set-Up window (the large top window) to
bring it to the front, then double click on one of the letters. This
will open the same text window where you first typed the words,
News Update.
3- Erase the words “News Update.” In their place type “Evening
News”. Then click the OK button. If you get a message asking if
you want to modify the objects, click “Modify”. In the 3D window
you will see the letters change.
The gray Play button only plays the area
between the green and red markers.
4- In the Animation window click the gray Play button to play the
new animation. Notice that the animation is the same even
though the text is different.
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Changing The Speed Of An Animation
Changing the speed of an animation makes it run faster or slower.
As a general rule the faster an animation, the more punch it has.
While the slower an animation, the more grand it appears.
PREPARATION: Look at the blue bars in the Time Line. If there
is only one light blue bar then you can go to the next step. If not,
click the TRY button again and see if this new animation has only
one light blue bar. If not, click the TRY button again and again
until the program picks an animation with only one light blue bar.
Note that there will be three blue bars total. One light bar
between two dark blue bars.
To make an animation move faster all you need to do is shorten
the length of the Transition segment. A shorter segment means
less time, a longer segment means more time.
1- Position the mouse cursor over the right end of the Transition
segment (the light blue bar). When you do this you will see the
cursor turn into a left-right slider. Click down and drag the end of
the Transition to the left, making it shorter. Release the mouse
button when the Transition segment is half the length it was. Play
back the animation and you’ll see your objects are now moving
faster.
Start with an animation having two dark blue bars and a
light one in the middle.
Drag the end of the Transition segment to the left to
speed things up.
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Drag the end of the Transition segment to the right to
slow things down.
2- Next, drag the right end of the segment to make it shorter by
half and you’ll see the objects moving even faster. You can also
drag the right end of the segment all the way to the right and you
will see the objects moving slower.
See how easy it is to adjust the timing of an animation? The 3D
window will give you real time feedback so you can adjust the
timing while watching the animation play. And notice that you
are doing this for eleven letters without touching a single keyframe!
Changing The Camera’s View Of The Animation
The motion of the objects and the viewpoint of the camera are
independent from each other. Once an animation is created you
can move the camera to any position and view the animation
from that new position.
1- Keep the animation playing. Click on the SetUp window, the
window at the top, to bring it to the front. Find the row of tools
below the 3D preview window. These are the tools that let you
change the position of the camera, lights and objects.
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2- Click on the Camera button to make it blue (it may already be
blue).
3- Next click on the Tumble tool (first tool in the group of five
tool buttons).
4- Now you can click the mouse in the 3D preview window and
drag left/right or up/down. As you drag, the camera will change
position. You can tell that it is the camera moving because the
floor and all of the objects move together. You won’t see the
camera itself because it is what you are looking through.
Let up on your mouse button to watch the animation play back
from a different viewpoint.
The other three tools move the camera in different ways. Take a
moment to experiment with them to see what they do.
Tumble-Makes the camera orbit around the objects
Roll-Makes the camera tilt side to side
Track-Moves the camera left/right and up/down
Dolly-Pushes the camera closer to the objects or pulls
it further away.
Select the camera and the Tumble tool.
The Roll tool.
The Track tool.
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide
The Dolly tool.
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A draft quality rendering.
Chapter 2
Rendering an Animation
Now that you have an animation it’s time to render it and save the
movie as a file which you can bring into your video editor,
compositor or other program.
The 3D window that the animation is created in only shows you a
draft mode view. Draft mode has no antialiasing, no motion blur,
no shadows, and no reflectivity. Only solid surface colors. That’s
because all of these things take extra time to render and the 3D
window tries to do things in real time.
There are two ways of seeing what the final image will look like:
rendering a single frame of the animation; or rendering the entire
animation.
Rendering A Single Frame
Single frame rendering is done to check what the final movie will
look like without having to render the entire movie. When you
render a single frame all of the rendering features are turned on,
so you will see the antialiasing, motion blur, textures and reflections that are usually turned off when doing previews.
A final quality rendering.
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide34
1- To render a single frame click the Render Frame button. The
current frame is rendered and will appear in a window. You can
leave this window open and do another rendering. You can also
save the image in this window to a file if you want to keep it. (See
Saving A Single Frame Rendering.)
By moving the Time Marker to different places in the animation
and rendering single frames you can do spot checks to see how
the animation is going to look. Once all of these spot checks look
good move on to rendering the whole movie.
Saving A Single Frame Rendering
After a single frame rendering is done is will appear in its own
window. When you close this window, the rendering will be
erased from memory. To save one of these pictures do the
following:
- Click on the image to bring it in front of all the other windows.
- Use the File> Save Picture... command.
You will be given a file dialogue where you can name the image
and choose the format to save it in.
If the Alpha channel checkbox was turned ON during the rendering, you will be saving the Alpha channel into the same file as the
RGB image. This enables you to open the file in Photoshop or
other image editing programs that accept Alpha channels and get
perfect antialiasing by loading the Alpha channel as a selection.
Click the Render Frame button to render a final quality
image at the current time.
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Click the Render button to render the whole movie or part
of the move, depending on how the render options are set.
Rendering The Movie
To render the final movie click the Render button. This will
render the movie based on the options set on the camera tab.
After clicking the Render button you will see a file dialogue
where you can name the movie and choose where to save it.
After clicking the Save button you will then see the QuickTime
Compression Settings window. Choose the compressor that gives
you the best results for the editing or compositing system you will
be taking the movie to.
In most cases you will want to save your ProAnimator movie with
as little compression as possible. That way you will be able to
mix it with other footage in your editor or compositor. You will
probably also want to keep the alpha channel so the background
of the movie will be removed without you having to “key it out”.
There are two compressors you can use that fullfill both of these
requirements. One is the Animation compressor, the other is the
TGA compressor. Both of these compressors are standard
QuickTime options. There may be others that will work with
your specific editing hardware. Once you have selected either
one of these compressors you should put the Quality slider at
“Best”, and set the color depth menu to “Millions of Colors +”.
The “+” sign means you get the Alpha channel as part of the
movie file.
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Rendering Options
The rendering options are seen on the camera tab. These options
tell the program what part of the animation you are going to
render, what size you will be rendering it at and what the quality
of the rendering should be.
(See the section on Rendering Options later in this User Guide
for explanations of these options.)
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide
Render with or
without an Alpha
Channel.
The camera tab contains the rendering options.
Render the whole
movie or part of
the movie.
Choose the size
for the final
rendering.
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Chapter 3
Changing The Timing And Speed Of
Parts Of An Animation
Oftentimes the preset animations will get close to what
you want but you may still need to make some adjustments to the timing in order for it to be perfect. Next we
will look at how to change the timing of an animation to
better fit the requirements of a project.
What Is A Pose? What Is A Transition?
The first step in knowing how to change an animation is
to understand a little about how an animation is put
together. Animation is the movement of objects over
time. To show time the ProAnimator has a Time Line.
When you look at the Time Line you can see that time
runs from left to right. It starts at Time = 0 and goes to
Time = 10 seconds.
An animation is shown on the Time Line as a series of
light blue and dark blue rectangles. The dark blue rectangles are called Pose segments and the light blue rectangles are called Transition segments.
Pose Segments
The Time Line
Transition Segments
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A Pose is a snapshot of the position of your objects in space. A
pose is very similar to a keyframe, but a single pose cound
contain hundreds of keyframes. A Transition is the movement of
objects from one Pose to the next. A Transition segment must
always have a Pose segment on either side of it. The simplest
animation would be three segments: Pose-Transition-Pose. There
is no limit to how long an animation can be. You can add segment
after segment for a very long and elaborate series of movements.
The length of each segment shows you how long it lasts. The
length of a Pose shows you how long the objects will sit at that
one position. The length of a Transition shows you how long it
will take for the objects to move between two Poses.
If you did the first tutorial you were introduced to changing the
length of a Transition segment. There is more than one way to do
it so let’s look at this in more detail.
Creating A New Scene
If you are continuing from the last tutorial look under the File
menu and pick the New Scene command. When it asks if you’d
like to save the current scene click No.
If you are just starting, launch the program and click the New
Scene button.
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Creating The 3D Text
Look under the Object menu and choose the “Create 3D Text”
command.
When you see the text window, type “Moving along” then click
the OK button.
Adding An Animation Preset
1- Go to the Animation window and click on the Object Animations popup menu. Find the preset called “Angle Slide”. Choose
it. You will see the animation start to play.
During the next series of instructions do NOT stop the
playback of the animation. The ProAnimator let’s you keep
the animation playing while you make changes.
Look at the Time Line. You can see that a single animation track
has been created. This track contains a starting pose, then a
transition segment, then an ending pose. To the left of the
segments are the words “Object Track 1” this is a name to
identify this track.
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Changing The Track Name
1- Double click on the track name. You will see that it becomes
highlighted. Type the words “Moving along” to rename the track.
After typing click the Return or Enter key on your keyboard, this
turns off the editing of the name so you won’t accidentally change
it.
(NOTE: if you accidentally clicked and removed the highlight
from the name, click and drag over the words to select them
again, then type “Moving along.”)
Moving Splice Points
As the animation plays watch the yellow time marker. When the
time marker is at the beginning of the animation the 3D objects
are positioned below the lower left corner of the preview window. Notice that they stay there for a bit before the letters begin
to move. The movement of the letters happens when the time
marker is over the light blue Transition segment. Once the time
marker gets over the end pose, the letters stop moving and they
hold until the end of the final pose is reached.
Move the mouse cursor so it is over the place where the first pose
and the transition touch each other. This is called a “Splice
Point”. When the cursor is over a splice point you will see that it
changes to the Splice Point Editor. Once the cursor changes it
means you will be able to change the position of the splice point
without moving the other end of the segment.
Double click the name to change it.
When positioned over a Splice Point the cursor will
change and you can then drag the Splice Point.
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Drag on a Splice Point to change the length of the segments.
Adding More Hold Time To The Beginning Pose
1- With the cursor over the first splice point click down and drag
the splice point until it lines up with the 2 second mark on the
Time Line. Then release the mouse button.
The animation will now hold for 2 seconds at the beginning, then
all the letters will quickly move into position before holding again
at the end.
Why do the letters now move so quickly? It’s because moving the
splice point made the transition segment become much shorter,
meaning the letters have less time to move the same distance, so
they have to move faster.
Changing The Position Of A Segment Without
Changing Its Length
In the previous step you changed the length of a segment by
moving its splice point. If you drag on the center of a segment,
instead of its splice point, you can change where the pose or
transition happens on the Time Line.
1- Click on the center of the transition segment, hold your mouse
button down, and drag to the left. You will see that the transition
segment sticks to your mouse cursor and moves left as you drag.
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2- Drag left until the segment stops at the left end of the Time
Line, then release your mouse button.
You will now see that there is no pause at the beginning. As soon
as the time marker gets to time “zero” the letters immediately
begin to move. Once they reach their final position they hold
there until the time marker reaches the end of the final pose.
What happened to the starting pose? If you look closely
you will see that it is still there, but it’s only one frame long.
Remember, a transition always has to have a pose on
either side, even if the pose is just one frame long.
Slowing Down The Motion Of A Transition
The speed that the letters move is related to the length of the
transition segment. The longer the transition, the slower the
movement.
1- Do this: Drag the splice point at the right end of the transition
all the way to the right. Make sure the cursor changes before you
click and drag, otherwise you may not get the desired result.
What happened to the speed of the letters? The transition
segment is now 4 seconds long so it takes the letters 4 seconds to
move from their starting pose to their ending pose. This makes
the letters all move much more slowly than before.
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide
Drag on the center of a segment to change
the position without changing its length.
Drag the right end of the Transition all the way to the right.
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Reselect a preset from the popup menu to erase your changes.
Resetting An Animation Back To A Saved Preset
If you change an animation and want to restore it back to the
saved version all you have to do is to select the animation preset
from the menu again.
Click on the Object Animations popup menu. Find the preset
called “Angle Slide”. Choose it. This will erase the existing
animation and reapply the preset animation to the objects.
TROUBLESHOOTING TIP: If nothing happens, click on the
Track’s name so it becomes dark. This tells the program
which track you want to apply the preset to.
Increasing The Length Of An Entire Animation
Sometimes you have an animation that you need to make shorter.
Other times you have an animation that needs to take up more
time. In both of these cases you must scale the duration of the
whole animation. Not just change a single segment, but affect all
of the pose and transition segments at one time. Here’s how you
do it...
1- If the animation is playing, click the Stop button.
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2- Click once on the starting pose to select it. You will see a red
dotted line surrounding the pose segment.
3- Next, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard. Keep holding
it down.
4- Now click your mouse once on the end pose. Let up on the
Shift key after having clicked on the end pose.
You will now see that there are dotted lines surrounding all of the
segments on this track. This means that all segments have been
selected. Shift-clicking is a very fast way to select all segments
that lie between two points. To scale the length of all the selected
segments do the following...
5- Hold down the Option (Alt) key on your keyboard. Position
the mouse cursor over the end of the last segment. This should
be at the 4 second mark. Click and hold down on your mouse
button, then drag to the right. You will see the segments grow
longer as you drag. Drag until the right end of the last segment is
under the 8 second mark. Release the mouse button.
6- Click the gray play button. You will see that the objects now
move much more slowly than before. You should also see that
the animation doesn’t play all the way through to the end. Once
the time marker gets to 4 seconds it jumps back to the beginning
and starts over. To make it play all the way through you will need
to adjust the end loop point for the work area. (See next step.)
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1
Shift Click between two points to select multiple segments.
Hold the Option (Alt) key and drag the end to the
8 second mark.
2
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Work Area
Start Marker
Drag the end marker to set the end of the loop.
Play Work
Area Button
Loop
Button
Work Area
End Marker
Setting The Loop Points For The Work Area
The Work Area is the portion of the animation that is played when
the gray “Play Work Area” arrow is pushed. If the black Play
arrow is pushed the animation plays all the way through from the
beginning to very end. But if the Play Work Area arrow is pushed
the animation starts playing at the green arrow and stops when it
gets to the red arrow. Additionally, if the Loop button is turned
on, the animation will play over and over until you click the
square Stop button.
The little green and red arrows in the Time Line set the beginning
and ending of the Work Area. Between the green and red arrows
the timeline is dark gray. This is to let you easily see the work
area. Playing only the work area lets you see part of your animation without having to watch other parts that you may not be
interested in.
In the last step you made the animation 8 seconds long but only
the first 4 seconds is playing back. This is because the red arrow
that marks the end of the work area loop is still sitting at 4
seconds. To set the end marker to be able to see the entire
animation, position the mouse cursor over the end marker, (the
red marker) click down and drag to the right until the marker is
at the 8 second mark. Now you can click the Play Work Area
button and watch the animation all the way through.
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Shortening The Length Of An Entire Animation
You can shorten an entire animation the same way that you
made it longer.
1- Shift-click to select all segments. (Click on the beginning pose,
hold down the shift key then click on the end pose.) You will
see dotted lines surrounding all of the segments indicating that
the whole animation is selected.
2- Next, hold down the Option (Alt) key on your keyboard.
Position the mouse cursor over the end of the last segment.
When the mouse is in the correct position you will see the cursor
change from an arrow to the splice point editor.
3- Click and hold down on your mouse button, then drag to the
left. You will see all of the segments grow shorter as you drag.
Drag until the right end of the last segment is under the 2 second
mark. Release the mouse button and the Option (Alt) key.
Click the Play Work Area button. You will now see the objects
moving much more quickly.
You will also see that after the objects stop moving, the animation sits still for quite a while. This is because the the time
marker must reach the red end marker before it can loop back to
the beginning. To remove the pause, drag the red end marker to
the 2 second mark. Now the animation will loop the first two
seconds over and over.
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide
With all segments selected, hold down the Option
(Alt) key and drag the end to the left.
Drag the end marker to the 2 second mark
to play back only the first two seconds.
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1
Click the left arrow key on your keyboard to
move the selection from Position 3 to 2 to 1.
Hold down the Shift key as you click the
arrow keys to add to a selection.
2
3
Selecting Segments That Are Difficult To Click On
When segments are made very short it is sometimes difficult to
click on them. The ProAnimator has a way to select segments
without clicking on them.
1- Don’t hold down any other key. Click on the last segment to
the right. This segment is large so it will be easy to click on.
With one segment selected you can use the arrow keys on your
keyboard to move the selection to the right or left.
2- On your keyboard, click the left arrow key once. You will see
the red selection dots move to the transition. Click the left arrow
key again and you will see the dots surrounding the thin segment
that is the first pose.
If you hold down the Shift key while arrowing left and right you
can extend the selection. For instance, now that the start
segment is selected, hold down the Shift key and click the right
arrow two times. You should now see the dotted selection lines
surrounding the entire animation.
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Chapter 4
Changing Object Motion During Transitions
There are a great many ways you can change the motion of your
objects during an animation. When a Transition segment is
selected, and the animation is not playing, the paths that the
objects move along are shown as red lines in the 3D window, and
the controls for the selected transition are shown at the bottom of
the animation window.
IMPORTANT! Before you continue with this next section you
should
1- Create a New Scene,
2- Create 3D text of the word “Transitions”, and then
3- Add the object animation called Angle Slide.
If you don’t know how to do these things please follow the
instructions at the beginning of Chapter 2.
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The motion paths of the Angle Slide animation.
When you select a transition in the Time Line the
motion paths will be displayed in the 3D window.
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The Arch Slider.
An Arch of 10 gives the paths a slight curve.
Changing The Curve Of A Motion Path
1- When you play the Angle Slide animation you can see that the
letters are moving along a straight path. Stop the playback and
click on the transition segment to select it. When a transition is
selected you can see the paths that objects move along as red
lines with red dots on them.
At the bottom right end of the animation window you will see a
slider titled “Arch”. When this slider is set to 0 there is no arch or
curve in the path. The objects move from their starting pose to
their ending pose in a straight line. The Arch slider enables you
to curve the path making it look more interesting.
2- Drag the Arch slider to 10 then release the mouse. The paths
will now curve upward a little. Drag the Arch slider to 25. See
how the paths are now curved quite a bit. Click the gray play
arrow to start the animation playing and see how the letters now
look like they are dropping into their final position instead of
sliding up into position.
3- Drag the Arch slider to 50. Now the letters look like they are
dropping into place from the top of the screen. Most likely you
can see the letters lifting up before they fall down, but the lifting
is happening offscreen. Only the light colored area in the middle
of the preview window will be rendered in the final movie.
Anything that is happening in the dark gray area won’t be seen.
An Arch of 50 gives the paths an extreme curve.
4- Set the Arch slider to 20, before you go to the next tutorial.
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Changing The Direction Of The Arch In The Path
Up to this point the Arch of the path has been up and over, as if
the letters are riding over the top of a hill. We can change this
direction. Find the Arch Direction knob located to the right of
the Arch slider. See how the arrow on the knob is pointing up.
1- Drag the Arch Direction knob so it is pointing down. Play the
animation if it has stopped. See how the letters now swoop up
from the bottom of the screen. This has quite a different look
than the when the animation was dropping in from the top.
2- Drag the Arch Direction knob so it is pointing to the right, then
increase the Arch slider to 50. Now the letters are moving off in
the distance before turning and traveling right toward the camera.
This is a very cool multi-overlapping look and is very difficult to
get with any other software.
3- Often a little change can make a lot of difference. Instead of
setting the Arch Direction arrow to the right, which would be the
3 o’clock position on the face of a clock, try setting it to the 2
o’clock or 4 o’clock positions. Experiment with different positions and see the effect.
4- When you are done experimenting stop the animation and pick
the Angle Slide preset from the Object Animations popup menu.
This will reset the animation to its original form.
The Arch Direction control will make
objects swoop down, or to the side.
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Controlling When Objects Start To Move
In the Angle Slide animation notice how each letter flies on
screen a little bit later than the one next to it. The secret is the
“Cascade” slider. The Cascade slider controls the timing of
objects as they move along their motion path.
1- Stop the animation. Select the transition segment if it’s not
already selected. For the Angle Slide animation you’ll see that
Cascade is set to 9. Drag the slider so that Cascade reads 0. Play
the animation and you will see that now all the objects are
moving together. When Cascade is at 0 all objects start moving at
exactly the same time.
2- Set the Cascade slider to 20. Now you will see that there is
space between each letter. Each letter waits a little bit before it
starts to move. This creates a spread-out cascade of letters.
3- Set the Cascade slider to 50 . Now you will see that there is
quite a bit of space between the letters. You still get the cascading effect but the spacing is so large that each letter now looks
like it is moving on its own.
4- Set the Cascade slider to 100. This is the top end of the range
and it means that each letter completely finishes its move before
the next letter starts to move. In other words the first letter
moves to its end position before the second letter starts to move.
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Then the second letter goes to its final position before the third
letter begins to move. This pattern continues until all the letters
reach their final position.
One thing to notice is that as you increase the amount of
Cascade, the letters move faster . This is because part of
the time a letter has to complete its move, is being spent
waiting for its turn to go. So once the letter starts moving it
has to move faster to get to the final position.
5- Set the Cascade slider back to 9, and start playing the animation if it has stopped.
Controlling The Order Of Objects As They Cascade
If you look at the Angle Slide animation as it plays you will see
that the last letter of the word comes on screen first, then the
next to last letter, and so on. The final letter to appear on screen
is the first letter of the word. The feature that controls the order
of the letters as they begin to move is called the Cascade Order.
1- The Cascade Order popup menu is located to the right of the
Cascade slider. It is currently set to “Right to Left”. Click on it
and choose “Birth Order”. Let the animation continue to play
while you make this change The animation will now play with
the “T” first followed by the “r” and then the rest of the letters in
sequence. Birth Order means the order that the letters were
created in.
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The “Selection Order” option lets you choose the exact order
that objects will fly onto the screen.
2- From the Cascade Order popup, choose the Random option.
Now the letters build on in random order. This is a very cool
look. You can change the order of the random sequence by
picking the Random option again. In other words if you don’t like
the cascade order that the Random option picked for you, you
can choose the Random option again and again until the cascade
order is more to your liking. For instance, if you wanted the T in
the word Transitions to be the very first letter that flies on, you
can pick the Random option over and over until T happens to be
picked as the first letter in the order.
The other options fit various other purposes. Top to Bottom, Left
to Right, and the others tell you what they do. There is one other
Cascade Order option that is very useful. This is the option called
Selection Order. What the Selection Order option does is it lets
you pick the letters one by one in the order that you want them to
move. Let’s do this so you can see what this can be used for.
3- Stop the animation. Click on the Transition segment to select
it, then click on the yellow Time Marker and drag it left or right
until you can see all the letters on the screen.
4- The selecting must be done in the 3D Scene preview window.
Click once on this window. Select the Selection Tool icon. (This
is the icon next to the Magnifying glass icon.) Click somewhere
in the 3D window but don’t click on an object. This will deselect
everything. You should not see any red or green selection boxes
surrounding letters.
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5- Now let’s decide which letters we want to fly on first. Say that
you want the word to build on from the ends towards the middle.
Select the T by clicking once on the letter. If you select it you will
see a red wire box around the letter. If you don’t see the wire box
try clicking on the letter again.
6- Next hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and click once
on the “s” at the end of the word Transitions. If you selected it
you will see a green wire box around the “s”. If there is a red wire
box around the “s” then you forgot to hold the Shift key down.
Go to the top of this page and start over.
7- Next select the “r” then the “n” and so on back and forth
working toward the middle. Be sure to pay attention as you are
selecting. You might not click on a letter. If you don’t the wire
box does not appear. Or you may accidentally click on a letter
that was already selected. If you do this the wire box will disappear so you will have to select that letter again.
8- Once you have all of the letters selected go to the Animation
window and choose “Selection Order” from the Cascade Order
popup menu. This locks the selection order into the program’s
memory. Now play the animation. You will see the letters cascade onto the screen in the order that you selected them!
Hold down the Shift key then select the objects
in the order you want them to move.
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By the way you don’t need to select every letter. Sometimes you
just want a few main letters to come on first and the order really
doesn’t matter for the rest of the letters. If this is the case just
select the main letters and leave the rest unselected. The letters
that were selected will appear at the beginning and the letters
that were unselected will follow in birth order.
Adding Start Ease And End Ease
For A Professional Touch
Real life objects accelerate when they start to move and decelerate when they slow to a stop. Think of a car. When a car begins
to move it speeds up over a few seconds until it gets to full speed.
It doesn’t just go from sitting still to full speed in an instant. It
takes several seconds for it to get going.
The same thing happens when you stop a car. If you are going 40
and you step on the brake the car does not stop instantly. It takes
it a few seconds to slow down first and then it stops.
Start Ease and End Ease are both applied using this slider.
Start Ease and End Ease are animation terms that mean the
speeding up at the beginning of a movement and the slowing
down at the end of a movement. Start Ease and End Ease are one
of the little things that makes your work look really good. Without this feature letters tend to bang into place. With this feature
the letters will settle into place. As a general rule the more Ease
you use, the heavier the objects will appear.
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Find the Ease slider next to the Cascade control. Notice that it
has two slider arrows. The light arrow on the left controls Start
Ease, the acceleration of objects as they begin to move. The dark
arrow on the right controls End Ease, the slowing down of
objects as they near their final pose.
1- Drag the End Ease (dark) arrow to the left so it reads 60. Play
the animation and you will see that the letters now settle into
position very nicely. By setting this control to 60 you told the
program to keep the letters at a constant speed for the first 60% of
the transition, and then slow down over the last 40%.
Since the letters begin offscreen there is no need to add Start
Ease. You only need to add Ease when you see the letters start or
stop while on screen, in the live area that will be rendered.
Dragging the End Ease arrow to 60 makes the objects
slow down over the last 40% of the animation.
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Chapter 5
Changing The Positions Of Objects
Poses are the positions of your objects. An animation is created
by placing objects in different positions at different times, and
then having the program move the objects from one Pose to the
next. We saw in the last section how to change the way that
objects move between two poses. Now we will learn how to put
the objects into those poses.
IMPORTANT! Before you continue with this next section you
should:
1- Create a New Scene,
2- Create 3D text of the word “Positions”, and then
3- Add the object animation preset called CrashZoom.
If you don’t know how to do these things read the instructions at
the beginning of Chapter 3.
If you followed the IMPORTANT step above you will now be
looking at an animation of the word Positions. Notice how the
starting Pose has the letters positioned behind the camera so that
the first you see of them is when they appear to crash through the
screen from behind. The middle Pose has the words come to a
rest in the center of the screen, and the final Pose is once again
behind the camera as the word flies past the camera and out of
view.
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Moving Objects To New Positions
The Move control is one of the tools you will use the most. When
you are setting up an animation and placing objects into their
positions the tendency is to want to drag the objects in the 3D
window. This is the old way of doing it. In fact, in most 3D
programs this is the only way you have of positioning objects, but
in the ProAnimator we call this Tweaking.
Tweaking is the very last method you should use to position
objects. It is the technique you use when you can’t get the Pose
controls to do exactly what you want. One advantage of using
the Pose controls is that you will be able to save your animations
as presets and apply them to any other group of objects, so you
should get used to using these controls as quickly as possible.
(For more information about Tweaks see the section called
“What is a Tweak?” later in this guide.)
We will use the Move controls to make the objects fly to a different place on the screen. As you play the animation you can see
that the second Pose is responsible for the position of the objects
at the center of the screen.
Stop the animation playback (by clicking your spacebar), and
click on the second Pose to select it. You will see the controls for
this Pose appear at the bottom of the Animation window. There
are two parts to the Move controller; a set of direction clickpoints, and a slider to set the amount of distance to move.
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide
The Move controls.
Dragging objects in the 3D window is called Tweaking- you
should NOT tweak objects if you can avoid it.
The Distance slider.
Direction Buttons.
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1st Pose
By default objects move
forward.
2nd Pose3rd Pose
Click the UP arrow to move
objects up.
Currently the slider is set to 0 meaning that the objects aren’t
being moved anywhere. They are all sitting at their Home position.
Instead of having the letters fly to the center of the screen let’s
have them fly to the top third of the screen. Here’s how you do it.
1- First make sure that the second Pose is selected.
2- Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and drag the Move
slider back and forth a few times between 0 and 500. Notice how
the letters come closer to you. This is because the center button
on the direction indicator is dark. Click on the UP arrow, and
drag the slider until the letters are positioned about a third of the
way down from the top of the screen. This should be at about
150.
3- Now play the animation. (Tap your spacebar.) You will see the
letters flying to this higher position instead of the center of the
screen.
4- Leave the animation playing and double click the center
button. Now you will see the letters flying to a far away position.
A single click on this button moves the objects forward, and a
double click move the objects away.
Double click the center
button to move ojects back.
Click the DOWN arrow to
move objects down.
5- Leave the animation playing and click the DOWN arrow. Now
you will see the letters flying to a lower third position.
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Pretty amazing how a single click could reposition all of those
letters, changing all of those animation paths, and you never even
had to stop the animation to do it! This is something you could
never do with the Tweak method, and shows you the second main
benefit of using the Pose controls: you can make extremely fast
changes.
Spreading Objects Apart
With the word now flying to the lower third of the screen, let’s
add some spacing between the letters to give it a different look.
The Bunch/Spread slider enables you to quickly spread objects
horizontally.
1- Tap your spacebar to stop the playback of the animation. The
second Pose should still be selected. If it isn’t, click it so you see
the red dotted lines around this Pose segment.
2- Hold down the Shift key and drag the Bunch/Spread slider back
and forth a few times. See how the letters bunch together as you
drag to the left and spread apart as you drag to the right.
Stop dragging when the letters just about fit the width of the
screen. This should be around 85.
Drag to the left to bunch objects together.
Drag to the right to spread them apart.
3- Start the animation playing to see the word flying to this spread
position.
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Select the first Pose.
1st Pose
Setting Bunch/Spread to -100 puts all the objects on top of
each other, as you can see in the picture below...
2nd Pose3rd Pose
Bunching Objects To A Point
The Bunch/Spread slider also enables you to quickly bunch the
letters into a clump. This is useful when you want the objects to
all fly from a single point. Let’s bunch the letters at the first Pose.
1- Stop the animation. Select the first Pose segment.
The controls will update to show you the settings used by the
selected Pose.
At the beginning of the animation the objects are off screen
which makes it hard to see the adjustments we make to the Pose.
2- Hold down the Shift key and drag the Move slider from its
current position of 1000 to a valueof 500. This will bring the
objects into view so we can see the effect of the Bunch/Spread
slider. When we are done with the Bunching we’ll return the
Move slider to its original value.
3- Hold the Shift key down and drag the Bunch/Spread slider to
the left until it reads -100. This puts all the letters on top of each
other.
4- Set the Move slider back to 1000.
5- Play the animation. Now the letters spread out as they move.
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Making Objects Spin As They Move
You can also make objects spin as they move. There are two
ways of doing this. One way is to set the rotations as part of the
Poses. The second method is to use something called a Path
Action which adds a rotation to the objects during the Transition.
We’ll show you how to do the first method here. The second
method is discussed in the section on Path Actions.
1- Stop the animation. Select the first Pose segment if it’s not
already selected.
2- Drag the Move slider to 500 so you can see what you are doing.
(By the way, you can also move the camera to see what you are
doing, but then you have to worry about getting the camera back
to the same position. It’s much easier to drag the Move slider
instead.)
3- Hold down the Shift key and drag the green oval on the Rotation control. Watch the letters and stop dragging when they have
rotated once around. It may take you a couple of drags to get all
the way around. You don’t have to be perfect.
4- Set the Move slider back to 1000.
Drag the green oval to rotate
the letters around the Y axis.
5- Play the animation. Now the letters both spin and spread as
they fly into position.
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide
Watch the letters in the 3D window as you drag the
green oval on the rotation tool.
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1st Pose
Select the 3rd Pose.
2nd Pose3rd Pose
Randomizing Object Positions
The Randomize slider gives you a quick way to jiggle object
positions. The larger the value the more distance the objects are
moved away from their original positions. Each time you click on
the slider a new random direction is picked so you can click over
and over until you get the pattern you want. For instance sometimes random positioning places two letters on top of each other.
If this happens just click on the slider and a new set of random
positions will be calculated.
Let’s randomize the positions of the letters in the final Pose.
1- Stop the animation. Select the last Pose segment. Pose
number three. The Pose controls will update to show you the
settings used by this Pose.
2- Drag the Move slider from its current value (should be 950) to a
value of about 500.
3- Hold the Shift key down and slowly drag the Randomize slider.
As you drag you will see the letters jumping further and further
away from their original positions. Values around 10 leave the
word still read-able, but just a little jumbled. As the values
increase the letters get more and more jumbled until you can’t
read the word anymore. Set the Randomize slider to 40.
4- Set the Move slider back to 950.
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You may see bits of a letter poking into the screen. If you do, it is
because the Randomize feature has accidentally moved an object
down in front of the camera. Each time you click on the Randomize slider arrow a new set of random directions will be picked, so
all you have to do is to click on the arrow and you will see the
letters jump to new positions. Click on the arrow over and over
until you can’t see any letters on screen.
5- Play the animation. Now as the letters fly from their lower
third position past the camera they jumble up a bit making the
animation more interesting to look at.
Shuffling Objects
Another type of randomizing can be done by shuffling the objects.
Shuffling is the process of substituting one object for another
object. The Shuffle control does a variety of different types of
shuffling. For instance if you choose the Mix 2 option every two
letters may or may not get switched for each other. This will
produce a word that is almost the same as the original word. As
you mix more and more letters together the word becomes more
and more unreadable.
A bit of one letter that has been moved in front of the camera.
Click the Randomize arrow until it goes away.
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1- Select the last Pose segment if it’s not already selected.
2- Click on the Shuffle popup menu and choose the Mix It Up
option. This causes all of the letters to get shuffled together with
no regard to where the objects started. It creates the maximum
amount of shuffling.
Choose “Mix It Up” for the maximum amount of shuffling.
Objects that have been both Randomized and Shuffled.
Now as the animation plays you will see that as the letters fly off
screen they go to even more random positions giving each letter a
life of its own.
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Animation Controls
Reference
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Easy/Advanced Controls
These buttons let you switch between the Easy set of animation
controls and the Advanced set. Both sets of controls are seen
below the timeline in the “Details” area.
The Easy controls are a subset of the Advanced controls. For
instance when in Easy mode you can only control the Arch and
the Arch Direction of a path. When in Advanced mode you have
the same Arch and Arch Direction controls but you also have
other controls for setting things such as the center of the Arch,
the Twist in the path, and for making objects overshoot the start
or ends of the path.
You don’t have to be a Rocket Scientist to use the Advanced
controls, there are just more options for creating more interesting
animations. However once you get used to them you’ll find
yourself working in Advanced mode with no trouble at all.
Track Commands
The Track Commands popup menu contains commands that
affect the tracks on the timeline. Following are the commands
and their function.
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Use these buttons to switch between
the Easy or Advanced Controls.
The controls are revealed below the Timeline
in the Details area.
The Track Commands menu.
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Create a camera track when you want to animate the camera.
This command puts objects onto their own track.
Add Camera Track
This command creates a track so you can animate the camera.
You are always looking through the camera lens so you don’t
need a camera track unless you want to animate the camera. Use
this command to create the camera track, then double click on
the track to create a Pose, or use the “Make Camera Pose”
command. (See Make Camera Pose below.)
Move Selected Objects To Track...
This command can be used in two ways. If you have some
objects that are being animated by one track and you want to
animate some of them on their own, select them and use this
command to move them to a new track.
Say for instance you have the word “Monday” and all the letters
are sliding in from the right. But then you decide you want the M
to drop down from the top and all the other letters slide in as a
second step. To do this select the M and choose Move Selected
Objects To Track and then pick the sub item “New Object Track”
this will remove the M from the first track and put it on the
second track. Now the M can be animated by the new track.
You can also use this command to combine objects that are on
two separate tracks. For instance if you import a logo, create
some text and want to animate them together, just select the text
and move it to the logo’s track.
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Delete Selected Tracks
Use this command to delete a track and all of the objects being
controlled by it.
Select All Segments
This command will select all of the Pose and Transition segments
for whichever track you select from the submenu. Once selected
you can drag the segments left or right in the timeline, or you can
click the Delete or Backspace key on your keyboard to delete the
segments. Deleting segments will remove the animation from the
objects but leave the objects and the track.
Object Animations Menu
The Object Animations popup menu is the control center for
managing animation presets. You can save presets, delete and
apply presets and also create individual Poses. The following
commands are found in the Object Animations menu.
Make Object Pose
When you select this command an Object Pose will be created at
the current time. If the Time Marker is already over a Pose
segment you will get a message saying you cannot create a Pose
here. However, if the Time Marker is over a Transition segment, a
new Pose will be created that splits the Transition into two
independent Transition segments.
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Save Preset...
Selecting this command will save the animation on the selected
track, putting it into the Preset List. Thereafter it will appear in
the list as an animation that can be applied to any other objects
on a track.
Presets that have been saved will appear in the Animation Presets
folder and can be copied to other computers and exchanged with
friends. When you are saving presets there are several important
points to remember so that the animation will work for other
projects. See the section on saving presets for more information
about this.
Rename Preset...
This command will let you change the name of a preset. As you
click and hold on this command you will see a submenu of
presets pop out to the side. Select a preset and a window will
open letting you type in a new name.
Delete Preset...
This command will let you delete a preset from the menu. As you
click and hold on this command you will see a submenu of
presets pop out to the side. Select a preset and it will be deleted.
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Append Preset...
This command will add an animation after the last segment on
the selected track. It works on one track at a time. As you click
and hold on this command you will see a submenu of animation
presets pop out to the side. Select one of these presets and the
animation will be added to the track.
Last Applied Preset
When you choose an animation from the presets list, its name will
appear here. This is especially helpful if you are using the TRY
button. You can click the TRY button over and over and then
look at this menu to see the name of the last animation that was
applied to your objects.
Object Animations Preset List
The bottom of the Object Animations menu consists of the
animation presets. Selecting a preset will erase all animation
segments on the selected track, apply the preset at the project
Start Time, position the Work Area markers to surround the new
animation and start the preview play back.
If you do not want the existing animation segments to be
erased, use the Append Preset command.
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Object Animation TRY button
The TRY button will select one of the presets from the Object
Animation Presets list and apply it to the objects on the selected
track. If an animation already exists on that track it will be
erased prior to the new animation being applied. Once applied,
the Work Area markers will be adjusted to match the length of the
animation, and the animation will begin playing back in the 3D
window.
Use the TRY button to get something happening fast.
The TRY button is not a settings randomizer. Picking random
settings would give mostly unusable results. The TRY button
randomly picks one of the animation presets including those you
have made yourself.
By holding down the Option (Alt) key then clicking the TRY
button you will get the previous animation selected by the TRY
button. If you want to see which animation the TRY button
selected, look in the Object Animation menu. (See the LastApplied Preset section above.)
Camera Animations Menu
The Camera Animations menu is the control center for managing
camera animation presets. You can save presets, delete and apply
presets and also create individual Poses for the camera. The
following commands are found in the Camera Animations popup.
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Make Camera Pose
When you select this command a Camera Pose will be created at
the current time. If the Time Marker is already over a Pose
segment you will get a message saying you cannot create a Pose
here. However, if the Time Marker is over a Transition segment, a
new Pose will be created that splits the Transition into two
independent Transition segments.
Save Preset...
Selecting this command will save the camera animation, and put
it into the Preset List. Thereafter it will appear in this list as an
animation that can be applied to any other camera.
Presets that have been saved will appear in the Animation Presets
folder and can be copied to other computers and exchanged with
friends.
Note that a camera is usually set up to look at something
specific and sometimes a camera animation saved from
one project won’t work for another project. This is because
the objects in the new project are in different places.
However, once the preset is applied a little adjustment to
each camera Pose is often all that is necessary to get the
animation to look good again.
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Rename Preset...
This command will let you choose a preset and then change its
name. As you click and hold on this command you will see a
submenu of presets pop out to the side. Select a preset and a
window will open letting you type in a new name.
Delete Preset...
This command will let you delete a preset from the menu. As you
click and hold on this command you will see a submenu of
presets pop out to the side. Select a preset and it will be deleted.
Append Preset...
This command will add an animation after the last segment on
the track. As you click and hold on this command you will see a
submenu of animation presets pop out to the side. Select one of
these presets and the animation will be added to the track.
Last Applied Preset
When you choose an animation from the presets list, its name will
appear here. This is especially helpful if you are using the TRY
button. You can click the TRY button over and over and then
look at this menu to see the name of the last animation that was
applied to the camera.
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Camera Animation Preset List
The bottom of the Camera Animations menu consists of animation presets. Selecting a preset will erase all animation segments
on the selected track, apply the preset at the project Start Time,
position the Work Area markers to surround the new animation
and start the preview play back. If you do not want the existing
animation segments to be erased, use the Append Preset command.
Camera Animation TRY button
The TRY button will select one of the presets from the Camera
Animation Presets list and apply it to the camera track. If an
animation already exists on that track it will be erased prior to
the new animation being applied. Once applied, the Work Area
markers will be adjusted to match the length of the animation,
and the animation will begin playing back in the 3D window.
The TRY button is not a settings randomizer. Picking random
settings would give mostly unusable results. The TRY button
randomly picks one of the animation presets including those you
have made yourself. By holding down the Option (Alt) key then
clicking the TRY button you will get the previous animation
selected by the TRY button.
If you want to see which animation the TRY button selected, look
in the Camera Animation menu. (See the Last Applied Presetsection above.)
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When you are learning, it’s best to animate
either the camera or the objects. Clicking both
TRY buttons is sure to give undesirable results
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Animation Timeline
The Animation Timeline marks the units of time, (either
in Time Code or Frames), and shows you the scale of that
time. The big mountain and small mountain buttons,
located below the tracks, let you zoom in to work on
details or zoom out to see the flow of the animation.
When the duration of the animation is longer than can be
shown in the visible area of the Timeline, the scroll bar
becomes active and you can then scroll left and right to
see the hidden Transition and Pose segments.
Current Time Marker
The yellow arrow that moves left and right along the top of
the Timeline is the Time Marker. It shows you the current
time of the animation. If you drag it, the animation will scrub
back and forth in the preview window.
Current Time Readout (the GOTO field)
These numbers tell you the current position of the Time
Marker along the Timeline of an animation is playing these
numbers will change as the animation progresses through
time.
By clicking in this field, you can type a time value and hit
<Return> to move the Time Marker to that point in time.
Current Time ReadoutCurrent Time Marker
Timeline
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Project Start Time
This field lets you set the Start Time for the project. Usually you
will start a project at time zero. However if you have several
animations to do for the same project, or you need to coordinate
an animation with some existing footage you can use this field to
start the time code anywhere you want.
For instance, if you had four 8 second animations to do, you
could start one at 00 seconds, one at 10 seconds, one at 20
seconds and the last at 30. This would help you to keep track of
which animation you were working on.
HOT TIP!
If you create an animation at one time and need to move
the whole animation to a new time, use the Select All
Segments command in the Track Commands menu. Then
you can drag all animation segments at once.
Project Duration
Type into this field the length of time that you want the project to
last.
The Start Time field lets you set the beginning
time for the Timeline
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The Duration field lets you set the length of the project.
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Choose the frame rate and whether to make the Timeline
display Frames or Time Code from this menu.
Frame Rate Popup
This popup menu lets you choose the frame rate of the project.
Several presets are provided for standard frame rates, and a
custom option lets you pick any frame rate you want.
Animations are based on time, not frame rate, so frame
rates can be changed at any time with no bad consequences. For instance you can create an animation and
output it for NTSC video (29.97 fps), then output it for PAL
video (25 fps), then output it for film (24 fps) without having
to do any other work besides changing this one menu item.
Motion Blur
Motion Blur is turned on with the Motion Blur popup. Motion
Blur removes the jerkiness that is sometimes seen in fast animations giving the images a more natural appearance.
Usually a Motion Blur of 8 passes will give you great results.
However you may need to increase the number of passes if the
motion is very fast and you need a smoother blur.
Motion Blur adds to the rendering time so use as few a number of
passes as you can. Motion Blur is applied to single frame renderings too so if you render a single frame and the blur is very short,
you may be able to reduce the number of passes without changing the look of the animation.
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Shutter Angle
This controls how long the blur is. The higher the number the
longer the blur. When you have a longer blur you need to use
more “passes”, (see Motion Blur above), otherwise the blur
won’t look smooth.
Animation Playback
You can think of the animation playback controls like the buttons
on a tape recorder or a VCR. The Scene Preview window shows
you the animation in real time (or very nearly real time), and the
animation playback buttons control what is being shown.
Play Work Area
The button you will use the most is the Play Work Area button. It
is the gray play button with little green and red arrows on it. The
green and red arrows are a reminder that this button will play
back the animation starting at the little green arrow on the
timeline and stopping at the little red arrow on the timeline.
These arrows are called the Work Area Markers. (See Work Area
Markers next.)
HOT TIP!
The shortcut for starting/stopping the playback is to click
the Spacebar on your keyboard.
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Work Area Start And End Markers
The little green and red arrows at the top of the Timeline let you
set the loop points for playback. This looping area is called the
Work Area because you can inspect a small section of your
animation over and over.
The ProAnimator lets you make changes to an animation while it
is playing, so being able to watch an animation over and over
while you make changes is a huge productivity booster. The
work area markers work in conjunction with the Play Work Area
button. (See above.)
Jump To Beginning
Clicking this button will take you to the beginning of the project.
Back One Frame
Each click of this button will move the current time back one
frame.
Play Project
The Play Project button will play through the entire animation
timeline for the full duration of the project. This button ignores
the Work Area Markers.
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Stop
Once the animation is playing the playback button turns into the
Stop button. Click this button to stop the playback, or click the
spacebar on your keyboard to stop playback.
Forward One Frame
Each click of this button will move the current time forward one
frame.
Jump To End Of Project
Clicking this button will take you to the end of the project.
Loop
When this button is turned on (dark) it will make the animation
go back to the beginning and continue playing, once it has
reached the end. If the Play Work Area button is down, “the end”
will be the red arrow. The Loop button works together with the
Play Work Area button to make the animation workspace play
over and over
Loop With Hold
This is a special kind of loop that adds a two second pause at the
end of each loop. Sometimes a rapid over-and-over loop can get
confusing and you need a little time after each loop to think about
what you just saw.
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An animation track.
Double click the name to change it.
Command (Control) click the name to select all objects on track.
Animation Tracks
Animation tracks act as the work space for an animation. Time
runs from left to right along the timeline. Pose and Transition
segments are created on these tracks and moved in time.
Objects live on tracks. When objects are created or imported
into the program they are placed onto their own track. By
placing Poses and Transitions on the track you get the objects to
move around. Objects can be moved from one track to another.
If you remove all the objects from a track there is no need to
have the track so it is deleted.
Each track has a name at the far left. By double-clicking on the
name you can edit it.
If you hold down the Command key (Control on Windows)
and click on the track name you will select all objects
controlled by that track.
Each track in the ProAnimator can control any number of
objects. You assign objects to tracks based on what you want
the objects to do. If you have a group of objects that will all
move in a similar way, then they should all be assigned to the
same track.
In most other animation programs, each object has its own
animation track. This means that if you had 50 objects you
would have 50 tracks! That is a horribly overcomplicated mess
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of data to manage. The ProAnimator coordinates the motion of
many objects at once. The result is that it’s much faster to create
animations and much easier to make changes.
Animation Poses
Poses are the dark blue bars that appear on the track. (Dark
green for cameras.) A Pose is an encapsulation of the position
and orientation of the objects on a track. In other animation
programs the closest thing to a Pose would be a keyframe,
however a Pose is much more than a keyframe. A Pose contains
information about the position of many objects. It also contains
information about how the objects got into those positions.
Poses can be saved as their own special kind of presets. This
enables you to position a group of objects in a Pose, and save the
information as a Pose Preset. Thereafter you can apply the same
Pose to any other group of objects with a single click. This is a
huge time saver when you have many graphics to do that all share
a similar look.
Poses can be lengthened or shortened by dragging on their ends.
Poses can be moved along the Timeline by dragging on their
middle.
Before
Drag an end to lengthen/shorten the segment.
Drag the middle to move the segment.
After
If two Poses are touching and you drag on the line where they
touch (called the Splice Point) you will lengthen one and shorten
the other.
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Dragging a splice point affects both segments.
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Before
After, without Shift key.
If two Poses are touching you can create a Transition between
the two by holding down the Shift key and dragging on the Splice
Point.
A Pose can be as short as a single frame or the length of the
entire animation. When an object is in a Pose it doesn’t have to
sit still. If you want to move objects while they are in a Pose you
can use a Pose Action.
After, with Shift key.
Hold down the Shift key and drag the splice point between
two poses to create a transtion. If you don’t hold down the
Shift key you’ll just move the splice point.
The Pose Actions area is located at
the right end of the Pose controls.
Pose Actions
A Pose Action is a secondary motion that you apply to objects
while they are sitting in a Pose. For the most part a Pose is a
single position, but Pose Actions allow you to give objects small
motions while they are generally in the same position.
Pose Actions include rotations such as tumbles, rolls and
wobbles, and larger movements such as title rolls and crawls.
Using Pose Actions, a title roll can be made with one Pose and
one Pose Action. You just set the speed of the roll and you’re
done. There’s no need to set start and end keyframes and do
calculations to figure out if the speed is right.
Pose Actions are part of the Pose controls. They do not have
their own bar in the Timeline.
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Animation Transitions
Transitions are the light blue bars that appear on the track. (Light
green for cameras.) A Transition is an encapsulation of the WAY
that objects move from one Pose to the next. A Transition
includes information about the shape of the path that objects
move along, and the timing for each object.
Say for instance you have an object that starts on the left side of
the screen and ends at the right side of the screen. This start and
end position would be two Poses. The way that the object gets
from the first Pose to the second is the Transition. The object
might move in a straight line, or a curved arch. It may face
toward the camera as it moves or it may face the direction of the
path it is moving along. It may move fast or slow or it may start
out fast and end up slow. All of these possibilities are controlled
by the Transition.
Just as Poses can have extra motions called Pose Actions,
Transitions can have extra motions too. Since an object is
moving along a path when these extra motions occur we call
these extra motions: Path Actions.
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Light blue bars are Transition segments.
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The Path Action Area is located at the
right end of the Transition controls.
The segment surrounded by a red
dotted line is the primary selection.
Path Actions
Path Actions are the secondary motions that objects do while
they are traveling along their paths. This includes motions such
as tumbles, rolls, spins and path banking. Without Path Actions
objects pretty much face forward while they are moving, so Path
Actions are good things to learn about. Path Actions are part of
the Transition controls. They do not have their own bar in the
Timeline.
Primary vs. Secondary Selections
Once a Pose or a Transition segment is on the timeline you can
display its controls by clicking on it to select it. The controls will
appear below the animation tracks at the bottom of the animation
window.
The controls only show you the settings for one segment at a
time. As you click from segment to segment the controls change
to reflect whether a Pose segment or a Transition segment is
selected.
If there is more than one segment selected only the controls for
the segment with the RED dotted lines are shown. This is the
primary selection. Segments surrounded with GREEN dotted
lines are secondary selections. Their controls are not shown but
the segment is still selected and can be moved, scaled, deleted,
etc. To make a secondary selection into the primary selection,
just click on it.
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Pose Positioning Controls For Objects
Poses are created by either double clicking on the track, or by
moving the Time Marker to the proper time and using the Make
Object Pose command.
Double click anywhere on the animation track to create a pose.
Although there is more to it, the simplest way to think of a Pose is
as a remote control device for handling the positions of objects.
A pose contains information about the position of each of the
objects that are under its control, plus information on how to reposition those objects should the number of objects change.
As you look over the Pose controls, you will see that there are
many tools which you can use to help position objects. Each tool
takes the form of a slider, a dial or a menu selection, and when
used together can quickly and easily position your objects where
you want them.
There are two basic ways to pose objects: manually or automatically. Manual posing of objects is done using the tools located
under the 3D window to move, rotate and scale the objects. ( See
the section of the manual called “Object Manipulation” for
information on how to use these manual tools.)
The other way to pose objects is by using the Pose Positioning
Controls. Each slider acts like a remote control designed to do a
particular thing. For instance one control arranges objects into a
circle, and one control bunches objects into a group.
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Before double click.
After double click.
The Pose Positioning Controls.
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The advantage of using the Pose Controls rather than positioning
objects manually is that it makes changes very easy. For instance
if you want to increase the size of the circle that the objects are
spread around, a single slider will do it. Hand positioning lots of
objects by hand is a time-consuming and frustrating experience.
Advantages Of Using The Pose Controls
At first you might wonder why you should use the Pose Controls
to simply move objects around. They can easily be grabbed and
moved with the regular tools in the 3D window. However, there
are five very good reasons to use these tools.
1 - Many of the tools do things that are very time consuming if
done by hand.
2 - You can add objects to the track and they will automatically be
put into the correct position. If you use the manual tools you will
have to move the new objects by hand and fiddle a bit to align
them correctly with the other objects.
3 - If you remove objects, the remaining objects are automatically
repositioned to close up the gaps.
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4 - Changes are a lot faster to make if you use the Pose controls.
Say your objects start on the right, and you need to change them
so they start on the left. If you used the Move controller to put
those objects at their starting position, changing them to the new
position is just one click.
5 - When you use these tools you can reuse the Poses on future
projects. If you use the manual tools in the 3D window, each
object stores its position as a “Tweak” and the objects in future
projects may not go to the same position because they don’t
respond to the tweak in the same way. (See the “What Is A
Tweak?” section elsewhere in this guide.)
Following are explanations of the Pose Controls.
Easy Controls For Poses
The Easy Controls are a subset of all the controls. When the Easy
button is turned on only five of the controls are shown. You can
get to the rest of the controls by clicking the Advanced button.
HOT TIP !
If you hold down the Shift key as you drag a slider, you will
see the affect of the slider in real time. If you don’t hold
the Shift key down, objects will update their positions only
when you let up on the mouse button.
Use these buttons to switch between
the Easy or Advanced Controls.
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Bunch/Spread = 0
Randomize = 0
Shuffle = None
Bunch/Spread = +65
Bunch/Spread = -90
Randomize = 10
Randomize = 40
Shuffle = Mix 2
Shuffle = Mix It Up
Bunch / Spread
This slider will bunch all the characters into a common center
point, or spread the characters away from this same center point.
This tool is very useful for setting starting poses that are off
screen. For instance pulling the objects so they are sitting just
below the bottom of the screen and then bunching them together
will make them all look like they are flying on screen from some
common source. This slider also gives you a superfast way to do
animated letter spacing.
Randomize
This slider will move the objects in a random direction away from
their starting positions. The slider sets the amount of offset away
from the starting point. Each time you click on the slider arrow a
different random direction is picked. This enables you to first
drag the slider so you can find the amount of offset you want and
then click the arrow over and over until the objects are arranged
in a way that looks the best to you.
Shuffle
Shuffle exchanges the positions of objects. “Mix 2” exchanges
the positions of every two characters. “Mix 3” exchanges the
positions of every 3 objects. The same goes for “Mix 4” and 5.
“Mix It Up” exchanges the position of all characters at random.
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Since the mixing is random some characters will move and others
won’t. In other words some objects change position with themselves which leaves them in the same spot. Each time the popup
is clicked a different random order is chosen, so you can click on
the popup (even the same mix value) over and over until you find
a mix pattern that you like.
Sometimes shuffling objects doesn’t look good. Shuffling
does not take into account the size of the objects being
shuffled, so when big objects are exchanged for small
objects you get some odd results. When this happens you
can either use the Distribution feature, which takes object
size into account, and so may fix the spacing, or you can
Tweak the objects into position.
(See “What Is A Tweak?” elsewhere in this guide.)
Click here to rotate
the Y axis only.
Click here to rotate
the X axis only.
Y = +50
Y = -50
X= +40
X = -40
Local Center Rotation
There are two different rotation tools. One rotates all the objects
about a common center, the other rotates each object about its
own center. The Easy controls contains the one that rotates
objects around their own centers.
The rotator tool has four places you can click. If you drag on the
green oval it makes objects rotate only around the Y axis. The
red oval rotates objects only around the X axis. The outer blue
circle rotates objects around their Z axis. Clicking on the plus
sign at the center of the controller lets you tumble around the X
and Y axes at the same time.
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Click here to rotate
the Z axis only.
Click here to tumble X
and Y at the same time.
Z = 20
Z = -20
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The slider
sets
distance.
The arrows
set
direction.
Move = 0
Move
The Move slider and direction controller lets you very quickly
move objects along the main axes. The slider sets the distance of
the move, and the direction controller lets you choose a direction
(up / down / right / left / forward / backward). Click once on any
arrow to turn the arrow black indicating that the objects are
being moved in that direction. Click the center square once to
move in the positive Z direction and double click it to move in the
negative Z direction.
If you have a fast computer, hold down on the shift key while
dragging the slider to see the object move as you drag.
If you need to move objects in other directions besides the main
axes, go to the Advanced controls where the Move controller has
a pointer which can be positioned to move the objects in any
direction.
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Advanced Controls For Poses
The Advanced Controls are shown when the Advanced
button is enabled. The Advanced controls aren’t really that
much more advanced than the Easy controls, it’s just that
there are more of them so it’s easier to get confused when
you are learning to use the program.
However if you take a few minutes and try each one you’ll
find that they all make sense and become familiar.
Since the Easy controls are a subset of the Advanced
controls you’ll find the same five repeated here.
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Start At Center
The Start At Center feature will move the objects so their common center is at the world origin. For instance say you opened
an Illustrator file and the objects it created ended up off to the
side a bit. A single click on Start At Center and all of the objects
will be moved and centered on the world center point.
It’s usually a good idea to turn on this feature. The camera
animation presets were all created for objects that are sitting at
the center of the world. If you try a camera preset and it doesn’t
look like the letters are where they are supposed to be, try
turning on Start At Center and see if that doesn’t fix it.
Start At Center - OFF
Start At Center - ON
Likewise if you are creating object animations and intend on
saving them as Presets you should always have this option turned
on. This way no matter what objects this preset is applied to, all
objects will have a common starting point.
Bunch / Spread
Same function as Easy Controls.
Randomize
Same function as Easy Controls.
Shuffle
Same function as Easy Controls.
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Advanced Move
The slider part of the Advanced Move tool works the same as the
easy version. It sets the distance the objects are moved away
from their starting point. The direction part of the Move tool,
however, is much more flexible. In the Advanced tools the
direction controller is a draggable 3D arrow that can be pointed
in any direction.
To position the arrow you can either drag the arrow until it is
pointing in the direction you want, or click where you want the
arrow to point. A single click will move the arrow point forward,
while a double click will make it point to the back.
If you have a fast computer, hold down on the shift key while
dragging the arrow to move the objects as you drag.
Local Center Rotation
Same function as Easy Controls.
Notice the difference in these pictures. Local Center rotation
rotates each object on its own. Common Center rotation rotates
everything around one pivot point.
The slider sets
distance.
Before
Local Center Rotation
The arrow sets
After single
click
direction.
After double
click
Common Center Rotation
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97
Common Center Rotation
This tool rotates all of the objects being controlled by this Pose in
one big group. The center of rotation is the average center of all
the objects.
The rotator widget has four places you can click. If you drag on
the green oval it makes objects rotate only around the Y axis.
The red oval rotates objects only around the X axis. The outer
blue circle rotates objects around the Z axis. Clicking on the plus
sign at the center of the controller lets you tumble around the X
and Y axes at the same time.
IMPORTANT POINT
Even though this rotation tool rotates objects around a
single pivot point, it is using this central pivot only for
setting the position of individual objects. When you
animate from Pose to Pose you will not see the objects
rotating as a group unless you group the objects first.
(See the section on Grouping elsewhere in this guide for
more about this.)
Click here to rotate Y axis only.
Click here to rotate
X axis only.
Click here to rotate
Z axis only.
Y Rotation
Click here to
tumble X and Y at
the same time.
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X Rotation
Z Rotation
X and Y Rotation
Distribute
The Distribution tools will place objects along various shapes.
The popup menu lets you select which shape to distribute the
objects along, and the sliders let you control various aspects of
the distribution.
Here is a list of the distribution shapes and the controls for each
shape.
Horizontal Line - Places objects along a horizontal line or lines.
Objects will be evenly spaced from one end of the line to the
other. Use the Size setting to control the length of this line.
Objects are applied to the line in the order they were created.
Size - Sets the length of the line. Making the line longer will
increase the spacing between each object.
Number Of Lines - Sets the number of horizontal lines the
objects will be distributed along.
Line Spacing - Sets the distance between the two end lines,
when there is more than one.
Number of lines = 3
Spacing = 300
Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator - ProAnimator / ProModeler - User Guide
Number of lines = 5
Spacing = 400
99
Number of lines = 3
Spacing = 600
Vertical Line - Places objects along a vertical line or lines.
Objects will be evenly spaced from one end of the line to the
other. Use the Size setting to control the length of this line.
Objects are applied to the line in the order they were created.
Size - Sets the length of the line. Making the line longer will
increase the spacing between each object.
Number Of Lines - Sets the number of vertical lines the
objects will be distributed along.
Line Spacing - Sets the distance between the two end lines,
when there is more than one.
Number of lines = 5
Spacing = 600
Objects distributed
around an X axis circle.
Circle X - Places objects around a circle where the circle is
wrapped around the X axis, the same way that the wheel of a car
rotates around the X axis.
Size - Sets the maximum diameter of the circle.
Shape - Flattens the circle into an ellipse. Positive flattening
squishes top to bottom. Negative flattening squishes side to
side.
Starting Point - Sets the position around the circle that the
first object will be placed.
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