Welcome to the home of Ben
|
Flickmation
Flickmation is an animation app for iPhone and iPod Touch. If you liked Flickbook on the DS then you will love Flickmation. FlickbookFlickbook is an animation toy for the Nintendo DS. It allows you to create an animated film by drawing a series of frames. Flickbook requires a DLDI device with write support, so patch in the normal way. Please post comments/suggestions/problems in the gbadev forums thread. The latest release is Flickbook 0.3. The latest release of the Java AVI Exporter is FlickbookAnimMaker 0.5. Always save and close a film before powering off your DS. If you do not you will lose the changes you made. If you are using version 0.1 of Flickbook (the Java AVI exporter is NOT affected) I suggest that you upgrade to a later version. In version 0.1 there is the possiblity that the frame order can become corrupted leading you to at least lose the work you have done in the current session and at worst corrupting the film and making it unloadable. Because of this version 0.1 is no longer available. ContentsFlickbook DS
ControlsPaintingYou paint on the current frame using the stylus. You will paint using the currently selected brush size and colour. Stylus and DS Button controlsYou can move the drawing area by holding 'down' on the D-pad or 'B' and then dragging the area around with the stylus You can zoom in and out of the drawing area by holding 'up' on the D-pad or 'X' and then dragging up and down with the stylus. You can scroll through the animation frames by holding one of the shoulder buttons and dragging left and right with the stylus. 'left' and 'right' on the D-pad (or 'Y' and 'A' for lefties) allows you to change to the previous and next frame. Most on screen buttons are selected by tapping them with the stylus. Some buttons may have a secondary function which is activated by touching and holding, for a short period of time, the stylus on the button. Paint Tools
Select the current brush size and colour. Drawing with the eraser tool (top left colour select button) erases contents from the current layer, allowing the lower layers (or background colour) to become visible. Touch and hold on any of the colour select buttons opens the palette editor screen. Palette Edit
The entire palette of 256 colours is shown at the bottom of the screen. The three colours assigned to the colour select buttons on the drawing area screen are shown above the palette. To assign a palette colour to a colour select button, select the colour select button and then choose the palette entry. You can change the current selected colour using the HSV and RGB sliders at the top of the screen. Changes to the palette are reflected in the frame image shown on the top screen. The background colour is always the top left palette entry. When you have finished editing the palette/assigning the colour select button colours tap the green arrow button to return to the drawing area screen. Copy/Paste Tools
Copy the entire screen or the marked area, if active, into the current copy buffer.
Mark an area of the frame for copying. When in marking mode, indicated by this button being active, you can mark a selected area with the stylus. Touching the stylus to the screen will start a new selection area, replacing any active selection area. You can then grow the area from this point by dragging the stylus. To return to normal drawing mode press the Mark button again.
The paste button is only available if the current copy buffer has some content. When selected the paste section will appear at the top left of the frame (if you have zoomed into the drawing area the paste section may not be visiable). You can the position the paste section with the stylus. When you are happy with the positioning press the Paste button again to perform the paste. When pasting you will notices that the Mark button is replaced with
Copy BuffersThere are eight copy buffers. The current selected copy buffer and its contents is shown on the top screen. Copy buffers act as the source and destination for paste and copying actions.
Onion Skin Tools
Onion skinning allow the contents of previous or future frames to be shown along side the current frame. The digit in the button image indicates how many past or future frames are shown. Tap the onion buttons to activate/deactivate onion skinning. Touch and hold the onion buttons to select the number of frames to include in the onion skinning, up to a maximum of three in either direction. A total of five onion skinning frames are available (for example, 2 past and 3 future). Playback and Frame Tools
Touch and hold the play button to perform looping playback, that is the animation will loop back to start when it reaches the end. Tap the pause button to stop looping playback.
Whilst the film is being played back only the Centre and Pause buttons can be selected.
Add/Delete Frames Tools
To perform the delete, touch and hold the delete frame button. A second delete button will appear. To confirm the delete drag the stylus upto the second delete button selecting it. To cancel the delete simply take the stylus off the screen. Centre
Selecting this resets the positions and zoom of the frame drawing area. Close and Save
This will close the project returning you to the title screen. You should always close a film before powering off your DS. A dialog box will appear if the film has changed since you last saved. This allows to to save the film, cancel the close or close without saving. 
The Save button will be available if you have changed the film in some way. Changing the film means adding or deleting frames, drawing on one or more frames, editing the palette or changing the film layers. Layers
Flickbook allows a maximum of four layers. Layers may be fixed (their contents is the same across all frame) or normal (each frame may be different). Fixed layers are indicated by the addition of a padlock image to the layer button. Each active layer is represented by a layer button on the righthand side of the screen. The current layer (the layer on to which you will draw) is indicated by the blue coloured button. The eye image indicates that a layer is visible. Tap a layer button to select the corresponding layer as the current layer. The layer must be visible to be the current layer. Touch and hold any of the layer buttons to open the layers editor screen. Layers Editor
The layers editor screen allows layers to be added, remove, reordered and their visiblity set. Tap one of the plus sign buttons to add a layer. The plus sign with the padlock will add a fixed layer. You get to give the layer a nice name. The green up and down arrows allow you to move the layer up and down with respect to the other layers. The skull and crossbones button allows you to delete a layer. You will be asked to confirm the action before it is actioned. A layer has two visiblity settings corresponding to if the layer is visible in the current frame and the onion skinned frames. The pencil column is for current frame visibility and the onion column is for onion skin visiblity. A green tick indicates the layer is visible whilst a red cross indicates the layer is not visible. When you are happy with your layers tap the bottom right green return button to be taken back to the drawing screen. There must be at least one active layer before you can return to the drawing screen. You can cancel the layers edit at any time by tapping the botton left cross button. Any changes made will be ignored. Skinning FlickbookYou can change the look of Flickbook by supplying it with a new skin. At startup Flickbook will attempt to load a skin located in the "Flickbook/skin" directory. A skin comprises a number of 256 or 16 colour 256 by 192 pixel BMP format files. As an example, the default skin (the one built into Flickbook) is available for download here. The title screen is a simple BMP file called "title.bmp". The buttons for other screens are described using three files, for example "drawarea_normal.bmp", "drawarea_pressed.bmp" and "drawarea_mask.bmp". And here they area: 
The "_mask.bmp" file defines the position, the shape and active area (the bit that will react to a stylus touch) of the buttons. The colour index of each pixel is used to do this. Colour 0 does not form part of any button. The shape of first button is given by colour 1 and 2. The active area of the first button is given by colour 2. Colour 3 and 4 define the second button in a similar manner and so on for all the buttons. Buttons can have any shape. Once the position and shape of a button is determined the corresponding image data from the "_normal.bmp" and "_pressed.bmp" is used for the normal (button not pressed) and the pressed image for the button. The normal and pressed files should share the same palette otherwise strange colour changes will happen. The number and function of the buttons for a particular screen is hardcoded in Flickbook. For example, the first button on the draw area screen must be the Add Frame Before Current Frame button and there must be a total of 29 buttons defined. If a skin does not meet these requires or Flickbook fails to read the skin for another reason then you will be warned and the default skin will be used. CreditsThe title screen was produced by eric3dee from the gbadev forums. Most of the button icons are taken from the Tango Icon Library. Flickbook ReleasesVersion 0.3 - 2008-04-08
Preview of version 0.3 - 2008-03-13You need at least version 0.3 of the Java exporter to view/export films made with this preview. This version of Flickbook cannot load films made with previous versions.
Version 0.2.1 - 2008-02-21
Version 0.2 - 2007-09-03
Version 0.1 - 2007-08-29
Java Flickbook AVI ExporterThe Java Flickbook AVI Exporter allows you to convert the Flickbook animations into uncompressed 24bit colour AVIs. These AVIs should be playable in most media players and can be converted into a more compact format using your favourite movie format converter. 
How to useRun from the command line as: java -jar FlickbookAnimMaker_0_2.jar
Or maybe by double clicking/right clicking the jar file. From the Flickbook directory on your DLDI device, copy the film_? directory of your choice onto your PC. Select File->Load film and open the flickbook.xml from the film_? directory you just copied. You will be presented with a Set frame bmp directory dialog. Select the directory that contains the frame .bmp files (this will be the layer_0 directory if you have not changed anything). You can now preview the film at the selected frames per second. To export the film as an AVI file select Export->Export AVI. NOTE: the frames rate of the resulting AVI file will be that set on the main window. The generated AVI files are fairly large (about 1.1MiB per second), this is because they are uncompressed 24bits colour. So you may want to convert them to a compressed format for distribution. Exporter ReleasesVersion 0.5 - 2008-04-09
Version 0.4 - 2008-03-26
Version 0.3 - 2008-03-17
Version 0.2 - 2007-09-15The source of this release is available here.
Version 0.1 - 2007-08-30
|
Copy
Mark selection area
Paste the current copy buffer into the frame.
. Select
this to exit paste mode and return to normal drawing mode.
Select the next left copy buffer.
Select the next right copy buffer.
Onion skin past frames.
Onion skin future frames.
Play at 12 frames per second.
Pause playback.
Move to the first frame.
Move to the previous frame.
Move to the next frame.
Move to the last frame.
Add a new frame before the current frame. This button is located in the bottom
left corner of the screen.
Add a new frame after the current frame. This button is located in the bottom
right corner of the screen.
Delete the current frame.
Reset the screen.