A TUTORIAL GUIDE TO THE ANI ANIMATION SYSTEM

Abstract

ANI is a three dimensional animation control program. It was developed in the department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary as part of the graphics land environment. ANI works as an animation environment that easily defines many types of different animation techniques. Although ANI was not designed for the non-experienced computer user, it should not be very hard to master enough of the concepts and commands to start doing basic animation very quickly. ANI works very closely with a system called PG (Polygon Groper), and can only animate objects created in PG. For those of you who would like to advance to sophisticated animation techniques, I highly recommend that you learn the basics of, and become familiar with PG. ANI was not designed to handle real-time animation (being able to see things move in front of you immediately), although some limited facilities exist to do this. Rather ANI was designed to create all of the individual pictures, which would then later be put on film or video tape. I will be mentioning various programs throughout this manual. For the location of these programs in your particular installation, please refer to your Graphics land administrator.