animation tools -- was RE: acid test stuff

Hi Alex, when Patrick first mentioned that "SMIL is not tool supported" I wasn't quite clear what that meant, but I gather from your statement, the term means application software (like Macromedia Director or Inkscape) that allows end users to animate things. 

I have talked only a little with Jon Cruz of Inkscape about this, but they are considering UI's for animation. Since I first played with Macromind VideoWorks on the Mac in 1986, I was struck by how the animation metaphor was wrong*. It was based on staffs borrowed from music (pitches combined and plotted over time) with the time line being one of the primary axes. That is fine for the auditory medium but it sucks for the visual medium. The dimensionality of the interface is wrong. Instead of actor-events being mapped in 2D crossing time, and with space somehow perpendicular to the screen, let us allow the x - y plane (the actual playing field) to be the drawing surface -- sort of like football play-diagrams -- a far more natural interface -- with time being symbolic or perpendicular to the drawing surface. This former is how Labanotation attempted to solve the dance choreography problem and why Labanotation submerged in popularity as portable movie cameras became cheap! Think instead of how video games give users a way of controling the actions of the characters -- the same class of interfaces would be natural for authors of animations!

So long as VideoWorks/Director's flawed metaphor dominates the field then only programmers and professional animators will make animations -- no wonder the field seems opaque to the outsiders!

So any failure to have tool sets emerge for SMIL probably ends up being due to the fact that the SMIL model of the universe is intrinsically closer to the solution to the problem than the conventional interface, which is why the application developers haven't noticed it yet!

There... that is quite a mouthful, but it may perhaps stimulate discussion on the subject for this group (which seems, occasionally, to be in need of fanciful digression)!

David



* I had build a prototype animation studio in 1980 that was intended to run on something like an iPad (which of course we didn't have at the time, but the idea was to have the toolset (as well as keyboard) appear on the touch screen).Animation primitives (like translate, pitch, yaw, scale, morph etc, would be part of the control panel). I tried pitching the idea to Disney and they were completely unimpressed with the possibilities of computer-assisted animation (I guess following Tron's lack of commercial success). 

-----------------
Alex wrote: [...]
        However more seriously: I totally agree that authoring
tool-chains that exploit the SMIL capabilities in SVG are
basically non-existent. This has been a huge failing with SVG
in general.

        The true reality is that the majority of web content
will be generated by graphic artists, not geeks using emacs,
vi or Visual Studio. And so, no tools means no (significant)
content will be created.

        _But_ as long as it is on your road-map then all is
well with the world, suffice to say there is a lot of content
in both the mobile space, and the STB space that requires
animation to work. SVG as a technology covers more than just
a browser, and I fully expect you guys to eventually set the
benchmark for all others to aspire to. But to do so, animation
is essential - heck in the Tiny test suite there are something
like 88 animation tests out of 500 or so tests, so at
best you can only get approx 80% pass rate without animation
and how would that look...
[...]

Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 00:55:41 UTC