Operating system License Proprietary EULA | Type Animation Creator | |
Stable release Awesome Animator (10.03) / September 20, 2010 Website www.awesomeanimator.com | ||
Awesome Animator (formerly Express Animator) is a software program for making animations, primarily Flash animations for websites. It is similar to Adobe's Flash MX software but has additional features such as skeletal animation and exporting to Silverlight and HTML5 Canvas. The latest version supports Actionscript 2.0 and 3.0 scripting. It is of the genre of vector based graphics programs in that it stores the coordinates of the shapes vertices. The shapes are filled with either colours, gradients, or bitmaps. The program was re-launched in 2010 as 'Awesome Animator' with many changes from the original program such as allowing more complex scripts, an improved renderer and various 'wizards' to speed up tasks such as creating buttons and charts.
Contents
Skeletal Animation
Awesome Animator features skeletal animation which is a way of linking together shapes such as arms or legs so that can be animated like a puppet. This allows the user to create moveable characters.
Tweening
The primary method of animation is that of tweening. This means that the user specifies the position, orientation and colour of the first and last frames of an animation and the computer fills in all the intermediate positions.
Morphing
Awesome Animator features morphing (also called shape tweening) which allows the user to animate smooth transformations between two shapes.
Import and Export Formats
Awesome Animator imports and exports media files in several formats to various extents. The main ones are:
Scripting
The scripting is based on Actionscript however there are some differences/short cuts such as instead of using the syntax on(EnterFrame){...} this is done through choosing the menu item "on Enter Frame".
Actionscript 2.0/3.0
Awesome Animator supports most of the Actionscript 2.0 syntax and also has a built-in Actionscript interpreter. Since 2011 it also has Actionscript 3.0 support including importing of AS3 classes. It has both a parser and compiler which can read actionscript from SWF files. It displays the methods and variables of a class in a tree-structure instead of textually.
Wizards
One notable feature of Awesome Animator is the quick menu which has a selection of wizards (dialog boxes) which allows users to create such things as animated text, buttons and charts very quickly. It also has a selection of pre-built and pre-rigged characters such as a human, crocodile, chicken and cow.
iOS support
Awesome Animator has a feature which allows you to export the animations in the HTML5 Canvas format. The Safari browser on iOS (iPhone and iPad) can't play Flash animations but it does support HTML5 Canvas graphics and animations.
No recent updates
Version 10.5 was issued in 2010 but has not appear to have undergone any further updates or upgrades. It could be that development has stalled, just as did its predecessor 'Express Animator'. The program is stable but is clearly in need of further refinement. (e.g.: such as being able to rename layers and have more control over editing).