As usual, my satisfaction at having completed an article of this depth is tempered by the knowledge of all that I didn't include.
Skewed and sheared paths never appeared once. I made no mention of anchored strokes. Patterns, the perspective tool and hatching never cropped up. These types of article are always an exercise in editing... even at the writing stage, what to skip, what to include. That editing is always guided by one main objective: To provide the reader with sufficient inspiration that they might try doing something different. To suggest an alternative that they may not have thought of in finding solutions to their visual problems. Years later, isn't it always the different things that you did that you remember?
For the first time I am able to reduce some of that disappointment as to what didn't make it by uploading additional material prepared for the article here on the web site. I still don't have copy covering the above-mentioned omissions but I can include stuff that was deleted from the article because it would not have been of interest to all the readers. There are other reasons too. For example, the current version of Expression is a bit buggy. Why am I mentioning this now rather than in the article? The article is intended to last long after this first version of the application has slipped into the pages of history, why waste ink on stuff that is probably going to be fixed in the next revision anyway. This is a more appropriate spot to cover some of the more time-sensitive information. The following items are in no particular order. They are just notes in which you might be interested after having read the piece in Step-By-Step.
Sidebar: Speeding up redraw...
System 8 problems...
Wildly different colours
The New Layer Crash
Path Operations
Brush names Here's another, perhaps more obscure trick if you are having problems finding
out what the name of a brush is. Open your Expression file in a word processor
that will open any text file (like BBEdit, TexEdit Plus, Microsoft Word) and
search for the following string...
The name of your brush will immediately follow the braceleft (the curly
bracket). You may need to search through all the occurrences of that particular
string until you find it. If that is going to be too much hassle in a 400k document,
try copying and pasting the brush stroke into a new document. Opening the new
document with the word processor and do your search. The curious will also notice
that sometimes the program seems to redefine the brush shape every single time
the brush is called... no wonder the files can get big quickly.
File diddling
Multi-stage blending
Animation issues Let's look at an example: I would like to create a sequence that will show
grass blades blowing in the wind. Unless it was destined for network TV or some
big budget feature no one in their right mind would animate this by hand. I
once animated an eye blink... I had 60 eyelashes, each a different shape, that
were active in each of 60 frames. Simple math told me I was orchestrating the
shapes and positions of well over three thousand little eyelashes. There too
I used the computer to generate the animation. If I had been required to do
it by hand it would have been considerably simpler, less effective and MUCH
more expensive. The same goes for this sequence. Here though, we have Expression
to help us which will allow us to create an even more elaborate sequence for
even less effort. For the purpose of the demonstration I will simplify it, you
can project just how it could be done in real project.
First I define the document to be the size of my animated sequence. I then
create two items, one is a blade of grass and the other is a bullrush. (For
the more advanced animator it should be noted that at this point one would also
duplicate these two brushes and fill the dupes with black. This would enable
us to create a duplicate sequence to be used as an alpha channel for the colour
image)
Now I draw six blades of grass and 3 bullrushes using the bézier drawing
tool. Two points per blade maximum for simplicity. I'll keep them well spaced
apart, however they are all sort of leaning in the same direction. (Fig 02) All the grass blades have a width of 2.0 pts and the bullrushes a thickness
of 14.0 pts. I then duplicate these blades, line them up with the originals
and then reshape them so that they are all now leaning in roughly the opposite
direction. (Fig 03) Now select the two versions of blade 1 and blend between them in 5 intervening
steps. Do the same for all the other pairs. (On a real job you may want to define
a Quick Key or a Tempo key sequence command to automate this part of the process
as it is mind-numbingly boring.) (Fig04) Now we have all the blades of grass in the entire sequence and all the bullrushes
visible. Time to build the sequence. Save the file (maybe save a backup too),
then select the first blade in each sequence. Choose Invert Selection and hit
the Delete Key. Render out to a bitmap file #1. Revert to saved, select all
and deselect the second blade in each sequence... and so on until you have 7
bitmap files. Such a sequence can be masked and repeated several times to create
much more grass. That's what I did here in Adobe After Effects. The original
sequence of 7 frames was followed by a reverse of the same 7 frames. This double
sequence was duplicated 3 times. I then superimposed 4 other copies of this
sequence over the top of the original sequence, slightly offset in terms of
position and timing. That's a lot of animation for just an hour's work. Mind
you, in a real job it would be set up to be much more complicated than this.
Click here to view the "Waving
Grass"
Continuing a path To continue a path you must first check the "Drawing Tools: Append to
Path" checkbox in the File:Preferences dialogue box. Then, with any drawing
tool except the freehand tool selected, float the cursor over an end point of
the path you want to continue. A tilde sign will appear next to it and you can
continue drawing at this point. (To continue using the freehand tool depress
the shift key when your cursor is over the path endpoint.)
Well, that's how it appears in the article now, but it wasn't always the way.
For most of the production period it stated...
Think of it. If you're sketching up some grass with a whole pile of closely
spaced strokes, the very last thing you want is for them to be spontaneously
joining up whenever you get close to the endpoint of an existing path.
Hairstyles
I use it under Windows 95. I illustrate hairstyles and haircutting diagrams
with it for a company that sells large point of purchase hairstyle posters
to salons. The illustrations come on a "how-to" sheet. I'll put the photos
under my Wacom and draw the faces and hair. Then import it into Draw 7 and
add lines, numbers, measurements, etc. (Fig05)
Graphic Design and Illustration is a freelance gig I do. I cut hair full-time.
The company that produces these haircut instruction sheets is always looking
for this combo hairstylist/illustrator, so it works out really well.
Well, the fact that Dan has a day job in no way detracts from the graphic
work that he does. He and his brother have put together a web site that is impressive
in its simplicity and organization. Check it out at http://www.PaternoGroup.com
In closing Simon Tuckett via email: simon@roboshop.com
Expression is currently incapable of filling a large monitor with
a full window -- and perhaps it's best that it doesn't. Even on a speedy computer,
you have to wait for everything to redraw when you're working in Preview mode,
and redraw is so slow that it might be unbearably painful on a large image area.
Drawing in any mode other than Preview is inconvenient at best, but here are a
few ways you can speed things up:
There appear to be some significant problems relating to use of
this program and System 8 on the Mac. I haven't really used the program under
the new operating system much (except to create the screen shots for the article)
so I can't really say what the problems might be... still, I had a larger number
of freezes, crashes and inexplicable behavior within the program once I had installed
System 8. You can still do stuff, it's just that some loopy things seem to happen,
particularly when you have other applications running (which, of course, might
mean this has nothing to do with Expression). Keep system 7.5.3 handy until the
next update to the program. One thing that might help (It certainly helps to keep
SuperCard from crashing) is to ensure that all desktop windows viewed in list
mode are closed while running the application.
As I said in the article, I have been unable to get reliable colour
out of this program... compare the two images that follow and you'll see what
I mean. (Fig01)
While I was preparing the artwork for this piece the program would
consistently crash immediately after I had created and named a new layer. As soon
as I hit the next tool it would crash.
Warning! If you are going to do the Path operations (like Front
minus back etc) just remember that the order of them is reversed to the way you
would expect. Front minus Back is really Back minus Front... or at least, it was
in all my tests. Secondly, unlike FreeHand and Illustrator, this application creates
an entirely new path after the operation, sometimes with plenty of new nodes so,
if you want to keep your nodes, edit your existing paths or do the operation in
Freehand or Illustrator.
In the article I mentioned the "Edit Brush Definition"
command trick to find out the name of a brush you have used. First you choose
the anonymous path, then select "Edit Brush Definition" there, at the
top of the edit window's title bar is the name of the brush you used for that
path.
SkStroke: {
The files are actually ASCII text files so you can open them in
a word processor (provided you force the word processor to ignore the file type
and creator notation) They look similar to object-oriented PostScript files. I'm
sure they can be edited but I think you would be doing it at your own risk. Edit
only on a copy of the original file.
This isn't really a tip... this is just plain cool. Create a path
and duplicate it off down the page say, three times, make each shape slightly
different. Now select all the paths and choose Objects:Blend Paths. Key in a number
of steps and BOOM! The process of advanced multi-stage blending has just been
made a whole lot simpler. I often avoid doing multistage blends because they take
a while to set up and subsequently engineer with the blend tool in FreeHand or
Illustrator. Unfortunately, here in Expression they are not live blends (as in
FreeHand) but they are a whole lot better than the laborious, bound-to-be-a-mistake-in-there-somewhere,
manual multi-stage blends in Illustrator.
For the type of animation we do at RoboShop, there are some interesting
possibilities with this program. Essentially in using this application to generate
animated sequences we are using two key features of the program.
Obviously we are not talking about animating Tweety Bird here but much more simple
things. Perhaps components of a larger piece of animation to be assembled in After
Effects. Anything that prevents you from actually drawing frames by hand is naturally
of tremendous benefit.
(939 Kbyte QuickTime movie)
If the link above doesn't work, try clicking this
link...
This was kind of embarrassing and it is a testament to the importance
of reading and re-reading a manual. I read the manual shortly after doing the
tutorial for the application. Somewhere in there I must have read (and immediately
forgotten) how you can allow the continuation of paths.
This, and a whole pile of assumptions and assertions were part of a final fact
checking email I sent to Terry Hemphill, the Expression Product Manager at MetaCreations.
He very kindly and patiently took the time to remind me how you continue paths
once you have allowed the option in the Preferences dialogue. It was at this point,
while I was still wiping the egg off my face, that I realized why you need to
depress the shift key when you want to continue freehand paths.
I received some interesting email recently from Dan Hassini who
had read the article. Here's how he is using Expression...
That's it. Feel free to send me email
if you have any comments or questions, my address is there at the bottom. In all
the years I have been writing for Step-By-Step I have received two letters and
about four telephone calls concerning the material I have written. So please don't
feel that you will be bothering me if you send along your thoughts! It's quite
nice to hear from people who read this stuff (yep, even those folks that didn't
like it or don't agree) because oftentimes I feel as though I am writing just
for Talitha (the editor) and I.