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Formation Animator is Now Available for XP, Vista, and Windows 7.
Formation Animator (including the free demo) requires DirectX 9, even if you're running Windows Vista or later. If you don't have it installed, you can obtain it at no charge from Microsoft's DirectX download page.
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| Formation Animator Overview | ||
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Formation Animator ("FA") is a high-precision application for animating images of crop circle formations. FA bypasses a large portion of Windows "fluff." Layer upon layer of performance-robbing management software is constantly being added to Windows and applications running under Windows. This software has no benefit to the end user; it exists solely to placate developers. Because it serves no critical purpose, FA bypasses the majority of this wasteful management overhead and provides a level of performance you're not likely to see in any other Windows application. Images are loaded into FA directly off your hard drive. (FA also provides built-in access to our online image library, which is always being updated. This library contains black-and-white, ready-to-spin images, free to download regularly after the product has been purchased.) You can use photos downloaded from the web, or any photo from your hard drive. Formation Animator supports the following image file formats:
Images can be manually rotated on any axis: 
Images can always be saved exactly as they're currently being viewed, with all rotation and other manipulations intact in the saved image. Images can be changed to black-and-white photograph quality (grayscale), or to a high-contrast black-and-white-only "monochrome" image. Manual image edit mode provides draw, erase, and flood-fill functionality, with zoom-in capability (with or without a grid) up to 32x. This mode is intended primarily for clean-up of stray pixels prior to engaging spin, or for changing the foreground and background colors of an image prior to spin. The Snapshot Overlay process incrementally rotates an image around any or all axes, stopping at user-specified intervals and blending that snapshot with the output image. This process produces effects that are every bit as interesting as those produced by real-time spin. Formation Animator was created solely for the purpose of animating crop circle formation images. As such, it offers a very high degree of precision control over all aspects of working with animating images. |
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| Correcting Image Distortion | ||
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You will almost never run across a crop circle photo suitable for spinning. The fact that these photos are taken from the air (with kudos to those ultralight pilots who make it possible to obtain these photos!) inherently means that the images will contain distorted shapes. They look fine from the perspective of viewing a photograph, but for purposes of spinning the image, it isn't going to work - you'll see nothing but a squashed circle or a perspective-corrected image wobbling all over the place. Formation Analyzer employs three distinct modes for correcting perspective distortion. All operate in a similar manner. Right click the mouse over the image, as close to the center of the actual design as you can estimate. A series of lines will be overlaid on the image. One at a time, click and drag the ends of these lines to appropriate locations on the image. Click the "Align" button on the Image Edit tool window, and the design will auto-align itself. Note: the auto align process (called "tag mode" in FA) gives an approximation; minor manual corrections (fine-tuning) will still be required. The reason for this goes back to the nature of the computer hardware. "Floating point" numbers are numbers with fractions - such as 23.125. Internally, these numbers can be represented with 100% accuracy only on occasion (when the fractions are evenly divisible by two). The rest of the time, the computer uses an approximation. The auto-align process uses thousands of calculations, often converting "world space" (very, very high precision numbers) coordinates to locations on the actual display window. Each time this conversion is done, some degree of accuracy is lost, since Windows does not measure pixels in fractions. By the time the auto-align process has completed, the inaccuracies have accumulated enough to leave the final image slightly distorted, requiring some manual fine-tuning before the image is actually ready for spin. Three separate tag modes are provided; select one based on what is most appropriate for the shape of the image. "Circular Mode" is intended for circular formations; it contains four "tag lines" with eight points (two ends of each line). "Rectangle Mode" provides four tag lines in the shape of a rectangle, while "Plus Mode" provides two tag lines in the shape of a plus symbol. |
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| Spinning Images: What You Should Know | ||
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Understanding the spin process is critical to getting the most out of Formation Animator. The spin process is not gauged in terms of seconds or fractions of a second. The rate of spin is so high that measuring it by a common standard is not feasible. The measurement process itself would slow the rate of spin considerably. The variations between any two computers can be so wide that any kind of common frame of reference is simply not feasible. Other software currently running on your system, the operating system installed, the amount and speed of your system memory, and the type of graphics card you have installed will all dramatically affect spin rates. In practical terms, this means that you cannot share specific information with other users of the application so that they can create the same effect you're seeing. You can pass on the pertinent numbers, another person can plug them in, and they will get a markedly different result. The faster the spin process is running, the more sensitive it is to the slightest changes in the delay factor and the number of degrees moved per movement. NOTE: Very high spin rates running for more than a minute or so can overheat the graphics card. If overheating occurs, it can cause an immediate shutdown of your system without warning. You should be sure your system is clean and well ventilated. There should be no dust or other debris (or objects) obstructing the flow of air through the system. If your system is properly ventilated, you should not experience any problems in this area. How the Effects are Generated Your monitor display area consists of a grid of dots (pixels). A "refresh cycle" consists of one complete update of the entire display. Monitor refresh works by "scanning" one row of pixels at a time, from left to right, updating each; when this row is complete, the next row down moves from right to left. Updating continues this way, left to right then right to left, one row at a time, until all the rows of your display have been updated. The average monitor performs a refresh cycle 75 times per second; this is known as the "refresh rate." Monitors vary in their refresh rates; most monitors fall in the range between 60 and 110 "Hz" or "cycles per second." Each pixel of your display corresponds to one location (4 "bytes") in memory that controls what that pixel is doing. Values for red, green, and blue intensity are stored. Whatever value is currently stored in a pixel's assigned location on the graphics card's memory will be applied to that pixel. This can create a problem in updating your display: what happens if the refresh cycle is halfway complete, and an application suddenly updates the graphics card's display memory? The result will be a concept called "tearing." Everything already updated in the refresh cycle - say, for example, the top half of the monitor - will display the content of the graphics card memory before the card's memory was updated. However the bottom half of the display, not yet processed when the graphics card's memory was updated, will display the newly updated data. The display will contain data from two separate images. Microsoft's DirectX and the applications built on it (as Formation Animator is) are careful to update the graphics card's memory only inbetween monitor refresh cycles, to avoid tearing. However Formation Analyzer deliberately initiates tearing to produce the effects it produces. The above description is a simplified explanation of what occurs. In reality, when an Intel Quad Core CPU is running under Windows Vista with the latest graphics card, the image could end up being displayed 25,000 times or more in one second. At this rate of spin, tearing will dramatically affect not only the display of rows, but the display of columns as well. With the configuration just mentioned, more than 51 billion pixel updates will occur each second. Tearing can and does occur anywhere in the display, any number of times in a given refresh cycle. It could be that every four pixels in your display come from a different rotation of the image. This is what produces the effects seen from spinning. For a more fluid, stable representation of a formation in spin, and / or for capturing or saving the net result of spin, FA's snapshot overlays feature is provided. Setting the spin controls exactly where you want them for a given image can require some time, so you're able to save and reload all your spin settings at any time. Note that screen captures while spin is active will freeze the display for the capture process and will only capture a single drawing of the image, as a whole with no distortions, rotated on some angle depending on your spin settings and when you execute the capture. You will not be able to obtain an accurate snapshot of what you're actually seeing on your monitor, either by either screen capture or live video capture, while spin is active. |
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The Main Formation Animator Window
The Image Editing Tool Window
The Spin Control Tool Window
The Image Display Window in 32x Zoom Mode with Grid Displayed
Access to the Online Spin-Ready Image Library