Hi Derry,

My position on animation given its close tie in with SVG also needs clarification as I don't wish to be misunderstood.

Quite some time ago you expressed the hope that I would do some SVG animation. I obliged both of us and did so, and had some fun doing it. There were definite rewards for the effort including, most importantly, comments and suggestions concerning my efforts.

This latter factor, as I have expressed before, should be an integral part of the forum. It is a place for dialogue and debate, not a love-in. How else do we learn to do better without insightful ciritiques? Lacking them, we just keep making the same mistakes until by some stroke of fortune we come to see them ourselves.

If someone wants to tell me that they think my effort is pathetic, that is fine by me providing they offer suggestions on how to improve it.

I have four major projects on the go, any one of which could be regarded as a full load. Thus any time which I set aside to work on an animation illustration, however simple, is a pricy effort indeed --- the corollary being that if no interest, negative or positive, is expressed in it, then I feel at a very deep level that I have completely wasted valuable time which could be invested elsewhere.

Although I have succeeded in generating interest and worthwhile comments concerning SVG and animation outside of the forum; here I feel that I have failed miserably and simply wish to move on in keeping with D_L's advice.

I still share the bright, foresightful, and profound visions of your founder. But either I lack the talent and promotional skills, or, in what would be bitter irony, this is simply not the place or time to test my efforts.

It continues to escape me why so few here have not grasped the potency and potential of SVG. But that, I guess, is not my problem and can no longer be a major object of my concerns.

Hence, to complete the story, lack of time and incentive prevent me from investing any further effort in animation IN THE FORUM for the forseeable future. It is not, in other words, a lack of interest which has been the deciding factor, and I have deserted nothing of previously declared value.

Thank you for your edifying comments concerning Opera,

Cheers and best wishes,

Muzz

Hi Muzz,

Don't give up on animation just yet.

I was one of those who tried to look at your animated page, but came up with a blank. (Running IE6, not Opera -- sorry).

Back in the dark ages, I do remember downloading an Adobe Acrobat thingy which allowed me to view a VM SVG demo. The reason I can't view your page, I am sure, is that I don't have something set up properly on my system.

It is only enthusiasts such as yourself raving about how great SVG is that prompt the rest of us to start getting interested, and to get better organised. It would help too if Microsoft had built-in support for SVG viewing.

I have cynically equated animation with advertising. But I conceed there is a fertile field for animation in the area of "how things work".

You yourself have mentioned the amount of time it took to make your animation. I struggle enough with html as it is, so prefer to walk before I run. And I would need to find some artistic talent from somewhere too. I might get into animation eventually, but it won't be this year.

So it wasn't lack of interest in your page that caused me to make no comment - I just couldn't see it. I suspect there will be others in that category too.

Cheers
Bruceee

Hi Bruceee, ....thanks for the reply. A long time ago I put together a package whereby SVG was introduced including the download. It no doubt has vanished by now, so here is the link page I use on my client's Knox Foundation site, currently being re-uploaded in order that I can make in a "real" SVG site --- a complete overhaul and major job.

Strictly for the record, I am not a religious man. This I mention only to ensure that motives are never misconstrued for its presentation.

If you start here, an HTML page, you are three links away from the download page:

http://members.shaw.ca/rrsknox/kfspdial.html

This is the Adobe viewer, version 3.1, download page. It is the simplest download in the world. After downloading, the very first time you access a SVG file, you have to accept a standard agreement with Adobe. The files load automatically, but if you ever need to find them, they are in c:\program files\commom\Adobe ...or something akin to that. There is also a slight delay the first time you use SVG while the files load.

http://members.shaw.ca/rrsknox/khportal.html

The animation link, is again,

http://members.shaw.ca/rcsvictory/knoxcrha.html
embedded SVG: 800x600

It is very simple; I have done better. But there is a definite element of irony which I will tell you about some time; ...i.e. the reason I called it a quixotic quest. This is revised from the first version I created which was actually more interesting. Like you, I am just learning to walk with this stuff.

I am now going to see if the midi file is still around; so try a second time later if there is no music.

I used motion where I would have used shading were that feature working properly. The challenge for all of us is to make animation a meaningful effort and not just a gimmick.

>>>>and, I really meant what I said about bricks as well as bouquets beomg welcome as regards my work providing a solution and a reason for it is offered. I love applause as much as anyone, but the real learning which I have managed to gain here and there has come from enlightened or informed criticism.

Cheers,

Muzz

Ok, I have revised it a bit to reflect some of the earlier flavour. My own criticism of it is that too much is happening. But to repeat, that is because the shading editor has a bug in it and I couldn't use it the way I wanted to --- so I used motion.

Cheers,
Muzz

The theme music is not, it would seem from "The Man from La Mancha" but rather from another production simply called "Don Quixote."

Muzz

Hi Muzz
Thanks for the setup instructions. I will follow them through. There will be a (very) pregnant pause while I do so...

Cheers
Bruceee

Hi Muzz
The baby is born, in a manner of speaking.

I actually already had the plug-in installed - for some reason it did not want to activate when I clicked on your page. Went to the WebEngine Demos and it activated there. (I got the Adobe license agreement.) Went back to your pages and now they load and I can see them. Don't how the plug-in came to be inactive - although it is a considerable time since I first looked at SVG.

For anybody who has not seen the WebEngine demos -- they are worth a look. Here they are: http://www.virtualmechanics.com/products/engine/demos.html

I realize that there is a second reasonable purpose for svg animation and that is art. Some things I noticed in your arty pages:

Your pages took a really long time to load (I am on a dial-up modem). Are they really huge or is there another reason?

The animation played only once. When I clicked refresh, the browser loaded most of the page all over again, before replaying the animation. For these sort of animations which are experimental, is a replay button possible?

In your quest for the crest did you consider either of these possibilities? --

Use a pixel editor on one octant (a one-eighth part), then rotate/flip to make the others. Use anti-alias if necessary.

This single octant is just a series of curves and lines - how about making it SVG? Then it would more easily scale.

Having said that, the final result you got looks quite acceptable - and if you found it more fun to use the image manipulators - I can identify with that.

As for the artistic qualities - I'm in no position to judge. We have an artist here in NZ whose work, I believe, is absolute crap - yet the arty types rave about how wonderful it is. Your work is much better than that.

Thanks for sharing with us
Bruceee

Thanks for the detailed response, Bruceee. You have left me with much food for thought or, in several cases, a recognition of the need to re-visit some old issues.

(a) A summary position on the Knox Foundation site is that I am definitely aware of its limitations. I am currently putting it back on-line after purging the ISP. It is a 10 mb site running to about 42 pages, so you only saw a fraction of it. Once back on-line; I am going to commence a wholesale revision with a focus on more SVG content. It was very well received by the client as is, so life can only get better. It was, however, only the 2nd site I had ever worked on and thus my introdcution to, not only Web Engine and SVG, but a myriad of other issues as well. Both Web Engine and I have "matured" considerably since I started working on it.

(b) You said "dial-up" by which I presume you mean 56K. If so, then yes, many pages can take up to 15 seconds to download in spite of some serious compression work which was done. I work on high-speed cable so I had a friend constantly checking that issue out, ...and he had much to complain about. SVG itself is inherently a very fast download, one of its major virtues, but .jpg and .png files are another matter.

(c) Also "yes," is the fact of the superior speed of SVG animation versus "image" animation. It was the very first thing I noted in contrasting the "quixotic crest" and the "blue moon" pages, the latter being pure SVG including the embedded fonts.

(d) I put together the rotating spokes, symbolic of a windmill (which was reasonably apparent before I removed the preceeding page), in one heck of a hurry to catch your attention as to the ease of achieving rotation in SVG format. Your suggestion of building a quadrant and cloning is a good one (see feature requests), but the only method of generating "texture" in SVG with Web Engine is via the .jpg or .png file import route (Hi Derry ) utilizing the stretch, tile, or scale options in the shading editor.

...Perhaps a bit defensive, but you clearly are loaded with talent and (sorry folks) have become the most interesting person to interact with in this forum since D_L departed, which is the perspective from which the first sentence in (d) was written.

(e) I suspect that we share at least somewhat similar views on art, a very large portion of the 20th century effort in that area being arguably, on rational grounds, pure junk of no psycho-epistemological value whatsoever. A partial indication of where I am headed in that general area can be found by doing a search for "Webshots" --easily located-- and looking at the work currently being done in the 3D-Digital Art field (look under Gallery).

(e) I have modest skills and a major interest in several fields including writing, and it is the inegration of these interests (which I refer to generically as "Image and Word") which is my goal in the web-site field.
It is, however, a goal of but very recent identification and I can honestly claim to have done nothing more but open the door and take a few tentative steps along an unexplored path in what will be a long journey. A geophysicist-mathematician I may be, but an artist I am definitely not.

Your comments, one of which, the integration of SVG and JPEG, I will address at a later time are muchly appreciated.

Cheers,

Muzz