2D Plan Animation

[Ken]

I wish for a feature to save 2D top/plan images as Quicktime animation. I'm hoping to include "developing" floor plans in my digital movie that contains fly-by's and walk-throughs. Ideally the plans can be shown fading in with different versions at the different parts overlaid on top of each other in perfect alignment. Currently I'm "making do" with animated GIFs, which look hokey. They're cheesy. Amateurish. The alignment depends on the screen pixels. No good.

Anybody know of a good method available right now?

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Kenneth

[Ken]

Thanks, Caleb.

Those VS calls for QT look very promising. It's been awhile since I played with VS logic (it's so darn logical!), so hopefully it won't fry my brain. Nonetheless, it seems you're suggesting that I can at least export *manually* frame by frame for each plan version.

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Kenneth

[Guest]

If you want the different versions of a plan to register in a movie, you should probably find a way to save each version in your file, or in some auxilliary file, and then export a single movie at one time with a different frame for each version. Let me suggest that you archive each version of your plan in its own layer. You can then make sure that all the versions are properly aligned with each other before exporting them, and you'll be sure that each image will be the same size. If you try to export each version at different points in the development process, you're bound to resize the document or do other things that will cause headaches.

VectorScript has support for QuickTime, so if you don't mind doing a little scripting you can easily export a single movie where each frame is a different version of your plan. Here's a sample script which creates a movie with a single frame:

code:

---

procedure MakeMovie;

var

movieRef : integer;

begin

if (QTInitialize <> 0) then begin

movieRef := QTOpenMovieFile('my movie');

QTSetMovieOptions(movieRef, 3, 12, true, true);

QTWriteFrame(movieRef);

QTCloseMovieFile(movieRef);

QTTerminate;

end;

end;

run(MakeMovie);

---

You'll probably want to adjust the code above by adding a loop that writes a frame for each of your archive layers.

You may find VectorWorks' workgroup referencing feature useful in creating a separate file that contains all the different versions of your plans. This might help prevent your main working file from becoming larger than you'd like.