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Render Bender

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A tutorial

This tutorial is designed to take you through the various steps in creating an animation from an Illuminator file supplied on disc. You should be able to use this tutorial without reference to the rest of the manual as it is designed for those who cannot wait and want to see what the program will do. A knowledge of RISC OS is assumed.

1. Load Illuminator by double clicking on the '.Illumin icon on disc.
2. Load the file called Bird from the IllFiles directory on the program disc.
3. Choose Select mode by clicking on the ^ icon in the Toolbox.
4. Click on the neck of the Bird to select the group of objects.
5. Click on the Animate.Show all frames menu item and note how the movement of the group is shown on screen in the window. Click in the window to clear the overlaid data.
6. Use the File.Save scene menu item to save the Scene file to disc. Put it in a directory called Scenes on a new disc and call the file Bird.
7. Delete Illuminator from the icon bar and load Render Bender by double clicking on the '.Render icon.
8. Load the Bird Scene file into Render Bender.
9. Set the following attributes:
           Picture size = 1/4
           Sky colour = Sky blue
           Mode = 13
           Ground = Matt
           Floor = 7
           Opaque Density = 1200
           First frame = 1
           Save Pictures = No
           Lens = 400
           Sky Depth = 100
           Lamp Average =1.0
           Shadows = No
           Floor Scale = 500
           Opaque R. Index =1.5
           Last Frame = 1
10. Ensure that Trace mode is set to Fast in the Render Bender menu.
11. Now click on the Ray Trace Scene button and wait. You will see a number appear on the screen to indicate how many lines have been completed. For a full Mode 13 screen this will be 256 lines but for a quarter screen it will be 128. A quarter screen is half the vertical and half the horizontal resolution.
12. When the tracing is finished the display is shown on screen in a window.
13. Create a Pictures directory on your new disc and save the picture to disc using the filename Test.
14. You are asked if you want to use the new path for saving pictures. Click on OK to use the new path.
15. Now alter Save Pictures to Yes and Last Frame to 10
16. Click on Ray Trace Scene again and the program will draw each frame and save it to disc automatically. You can go and mow the lawn or have a relaxing cup of coffee whilst this goes on.
17. When all the files have been saved quit Render Bender and load Animator by clicking on the !Animator icon.
18. Drag one of the numbered Bird files from the Pictures directory onto the Animator icon. The numbers 1 to 10 are listed with an additional 1 at the end.
19. Edit the list of numbers to have two 10's followed by 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1.
20. Click on Compile Animation and wait a few moments.
21. When complete click on the See Animation button to view the animation. The Select button on the mouse speeds up the animation and Adjust slows it down. Menu aborts the animation.
22. Click on menu to bring up the Animator menu and click on Show.Full screen before clicking on See Animation again.
23. Go to the Save Application option and save out the animation either as a windowed or full screen version.

Congratulations, you now have your first animation using the new Render Bender package and wasn't it easy !

RISCWorld