This is the first of a series of web pages, that have some sort of spinning GIF animation. They were created for a presentation I am giving at The International CorelDRAW Conference, in Toronto and San Diego. Each was created a bit differently. This one was produced using a combination of Draw, Photo-Paint and finally GIF Construction set.
In Draw, I created the text and extruded it, with the vanishing point set to the center of the image and a depth of 1. I duplicated this so that I had 14 images. I then used the rotation feature of the Extrude tool, to rotate each one around the vertical axis. This is best accomplished with the numerical inputs, rather than the trackball. (Note that the values do not correspond to degrees. But by playing with a series of positive and negative values for axis 2, you can get reasonable increments.)
After saving the Draw file (in case I want to come back and make so changes), I exported the entire page as a 100 dpi Photo-Paint file. Since the bulk of the work will be done there, I found it much easier to open the CPT file and copy and paste to the animation file.
The animation background was created as a single CPT file, utilizing “The Boss” effect. I then created a movie from it, using that option on the menu. I created 13 more frames, opting to duplicate the first frame, so each had the same background. Then I simply lassoed each rotation element from the extrusion image file, and did a copy/paste into the appropriate frame.
The lasso grabbed the text boundaries, but didn't isolate the holes. So, I recorded a script that would use a color mask on the pasted element to isolate just the text, create a new object from that, delete the original object, remove the mask and merge the new object with the frame background. Thus, I only had to click the play button on the recorder to do all of this for each frame.
The next page started as a Draw file, but all the rotations were done in Photo-Paint. Click to see more…
