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Shifting Light on Gold Tutorial

fleur.jpg (1182 bytes)  The effect I tried to achieve is that of a light playing on a golden surface. 
This tutorial requires the following:
  • Paint Shop Pro and Animation Shop
  • Blade Pro
  • File containing bitmaps to substitute for the usual bitmap associated with the Blade Pro "gold, basic" setting. (download here)
  • Some kind of font or simple graphic you want to animate.

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Step 1 Unzip the "rotated-golds" file and put gold-0.bmp, gold-23.bmp, gold-45.bmp and gold-68.bmp into the "environments and textures" folder associated with Blade Pro.
Step 2 Open a new file.  The one I used was 100 x 100 pixels.  Create the layers you are going to need
  • Fill
  • Frame 1
Step 3 Flood fill the "Fill" layer with the pattern you want your animation to appear against.  (Or a solid color closely matching the main color of the pattern which you will set to transparent for the GIF animation.)
Step 4 Move to the next layer up (Frame 1).  Drop some text, (or a simple graphic) on the background.  I chose "Q" from Fleurons with floating and anti-alias checked.  Save this selection to the alpha channel.  Duplicate this layer for as many total frames you want to assemble the animation..
Step 5 Go back to Frame 1.  Apply Blade Pro to the selection.  Use the "gold, basic" preset, but click on the environment button and choose gold-0.bmp.  Save the result as the first frame of your animation.  Turn off visibility for this layer.
Step 6 Move to the next layer up.  If you need to, reload the selection from the alpha channel.  Repeat Step 5, but this time use gold-23.bmp as the environment bitmap for the "gold, basic" preset.
Step 7 Repeat the above step, moving up a layer each time.  Use gold-45.bmp and gold-68.bmp for the environment bitmap, in turn.
Step 8 Again, repeat the above step, but now use gold-0.bmp for the environment and rotate it by 90 degrees.  (Click the curved arrow.)
Step 9 Repeat Steps 6 and 7 but rotate the appropriate environment bitmap by 90 degrees each time.
Step 10 Assemble these frames into an animation.
Note 1 For the animation above, I actually started at 68 degrees and went to 180 degrees (gold-0 with two clicks of the rotate arrow in Blade Pro).  Then I swung it back to 68 degrees.  I put 20 seconds in between frames, but the first frame and the middle frame I increased to 30 seconds so that there was a bit of a dwell at the ends of the swing.
Note 2 If you thought ahead at Step 5, you realized that you would use this gold-0.bmp again and did the rotations at this point.  Ditto for a few others.
fleur.jpg (1182 bytes)      E-mail me with any questions or comments.
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This page last modified on 09/09/98 09:35 AM CDT.