Found old animation program for

[johnl3d]

I used this quite a bit

 

 

 

even then they wanted dragon button

 

[John Bigboote]

Cool. I was using 'Deluxe Paint' on an Amiga- my 1st introduction to computer animation. It was a GREAT animation app- but limited to only 8 bit color depth. If they would have ever done a 24 bit color depth it would have caught on BIG. (Electronic Arts)

[johnl3d]

Played with deluxe paint also and various other programs before getting into AM in 98 and my first computer OSI Challenger 4P I got familiar with machine language so I could built characters for simple animations using the built in font in rom which had shapes that allowed this around late 70's

[robcat2075]

My first real CG job was (the kind you go to every day) was doing graphics for video in Deluxe Paint on the AMIGA. Every graphic, every animation was done in that one program.

 

A few years later the guy who hired me for that job hired me to a new place that was all Mac.

 

"Why does everything take you so much longer now?" he asked.

 

Things that were simple to do in 8-bit color like color cycling didn't even exist in 24-bit Photoshop or any other program on the Mac that we had.

 

We still can't do Color cycling. It's gone!

[Rodney]

We still can't do Color cycling. It's gone!

 

I was commenting the other day to someone offline that there are many little things from back in the DOS days that current programs don't take advantage of.

Color cycling is certainly one of them.

 

It may be that these methods are used but mostly used behind the scenes and not through the interface by current users.

Color cycling surely must be leveraged in game engines for instance.

 

This may be one of the downsides of the overpowering (and useful) technologies introduced such as the Alpha Channel.

When those came along there wasn't much use for the tricks/workarounds used to overcome the limits of 8bit graphics.

[John Bigboote]

We still can't do Color cycling. It's gone!

 

Yeah- that was a powerful feature. The guy I worked on a DPS(Paintbox) would generate a color cycle and feed it into his system- put it thru a mask and use it to show blood going thru arteries or brake fluid going thru the lines. I was REALLY hoping they would make a 24 bit version, and when I was at my first Siggraph in the mid 1990's I stopped by the EA booth to see if there were any plans... none of the guys there had even heard of Deluxe Paint...

[largento]

Old School Color Cycling with HTML 5

 

Someone's figured out how to do it with HTML 5. The gallery is neat-o.

[robcat2075]

Old School Color Cycling with HTML 5

 

Someone's figured out how to do it with HTML 5. The gallery is neat-o.

 

 

Those are very impressive.

[Tore]

Oh yes, ye olden days of Deluxe Paint!! It was an excellent piece of software! What could be done can be seen in this animation, Benny Kanin (Benny the Rabbit) made by a 16 year old (very talented) school boy (Paul Riishede) on an Amiga with DPaint. He sent the animation to the tv-program "Troldspejlet" (The Magic Mirror) of which I was co-editor at that time (1992).

If you jump to 1:30 you'll skip the danish spoken presentation.

(The signature start of the show was by the way animated by me using a combination of Imagine 3D and DPaint, and signature tune composed and played by me, using an Amiga).

 

http://www.dr.dk/Ultra/Troldspejlet/Pixels...00930123201.htm

[Rodney]

Old School Color Cycling with HTML 5

 

Someone's figured out how to do it with HTML 5. The gallery is neat-o.

 

While very impressive its still a bit sad in a way because the underlying imagery requires 30 year old software no longer available.

According to the write up those image where still created by Deluxe Paint although translated for use in modern day browsers. The orginal imagery being translated to JSON for use in HTML.

 

Mark's scenes are actually Amiga IFF / ILBM files, originally created with Deluxe Paint in DOS. Ah, those were the days! So, to make this work, I had to write a converter program which parses the files and extracts the pixels, the palette colors, and all the cycling information, and writes it out as something JavaScript can understand. The data is stored as JSON on disk, and delivered to the browser with gzip compression. The data sent over the wire ends up being about 100K per scene, which isn't too bad (most of the soundtracks are larger than that, haha). My converter script is written in C++, but included in the source package if you are interested.

 

 

Very impressive though.

 

Added: It's interesting to note that the author has improved on the original technology by producing what he terms BlendShift Cycling. He explains it thusly:

 

BlendShift Cycling

Those of you familiar with color cycling may notice something a little "different" about the palette animation in this engine. Many years ago I had an idea to improve color cycling by "fading" colors into each other as they shifted, to produce many "in between" frames, while preserving the overall "speed" of the cycling effect. This creates a much smoother appearance, and gives the illusion of more colors in the scene. I call this technique BlendShift Cycling. Someone may have invented this before me, but I've certainly never seen it used.

You can really see the effect this has if you slow down the cycling speed (Click "Show Options" and click on either ¼ or ½), then turn BlendShift off and on by clicking on the "Standard" and "Blend" cycling modes. See the difference? The colors "shift" positions in whole steps when using Standard mode, but fade smoothly into each other when using BlendShift. If only I'd invented this trick 20 years ago when it really mattered!

 

This in my estimation is why old tech needs to be revisited often because things can always be improved upon later.

[robcat2075]

I suppose, technically, I can still do color cycling since I still have my AMIGA. Haven't fired it up since probably the mid 90's though.

[Rodney]

One of the neat things mentioned in the interview was how the artist was able to see the cycling even while creating the art.

This has direct implications for the creation of animated art today beyond the element of color cycling.

By this I mean to say that one could create a 3D mask (a shape in 3D space) where things either move or do not move (i.e. toggle the mask to be either negative or positive).

Outside of this mask the assigned effect would not apply.

In other words, the cycling of data would be defined to allow movement/animation of objects (or surfaces of objects) to be visible (or not visible) anywhere in 3D space in realtime.

Shades of Boolean cutters anyone?

 

Why would this would work better now than in the past?

Because technology such as deep pixels didn't exist back then and the cycling of pixel states is no longer confined to the pixels stored on 2D planes (i.e. linear).

 

This surely must be related in some bit-wise way to the tech that is coming online that allows objects to be removed from video without effecting other content.

Seam Carving itself follows the general outline expressed by the artist when he describes how he used a template to limit his view when drawing the path of rain or snow in his color cycling drawings.

 

Okay... I had better stop there before I hurt myself.

[largento]

Looks like this ProMotion app does it. It refers to both color cycling and palette cycling.