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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 1Unzip 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 2Open a new file.  The one I used was 100 x 100 pixels.  Create the layers you are going to need
  • Fill
  • Frame 1
Step 3Flood 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 4Move 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 5Go 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 6Move 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 7Repeat the above step, moving up a layer each time.  Use gold-45.bmp and gold-68.bmp for the environment bitmap, in turn.
Step 8Again, repeat the above step, but now use gold-0.bmp for the environment and rotate it by 90 degrees.  (Click the curved arrow.)
Step 9Repeat Steps 6 and 7 but rotate the appropriate environment bitmap by 90 degrees each time.
Step 10Assemble these frames into an animation.
Note 1For 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 2If 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.