Animations add life to any publication. They can highlight specific items and keep your audience’s interest. They can be used simply for an interesting visual effect or to explain complex structures by building one layer on top of another. Opus provides a variety of ways that you can animate objects from simply showing and hiding objects to moving objects around the page.
You can animate objects in Opus as follows:
These are "animations" which occur whenever the object appears on screen or is hidden. This means that instead of the object simply appearing or disappearing from the page, you can set how the object shows/hides from a wide selection of effects ranging from a simple fade to a full 3D spin.
You can set a Show and Hide transition for any object and they are part of the object’s properties and are set by selecting from the options available on the Transitions tab of the Properties dialog
You can choose from a very wide range of effects and set the time that they take. However there are no other options and the animation only occurs once.
These are the text equivalents of Transitions. Although text can also have transitions applied to it just as any other object can, these animations are specific as they use individual letters or words as the objects of the animation.
As with transitions they occur when the text appears or disappears from the screen and you therefore can set a Show and/or Hide animation for the text via Animations tab on the Properties dialog.
You can now make complex and effective animations easily using the tween object. Simply create the tween frame and place your objects in it. Then set keyframes where you want the key points of your animation – edit the object to be in the state you want at a particular keypoint and Opus will automatically create the intervening frames of animation.
You can even morph the shape of vector objects using node tweening – edit the nodes of the shape at a keyframe and the program will morph the object into that shape.
Tween animation can be used to set up simple animations more easily by allowing you to simply move objects to key positions and/or sizes and then letting Opus create all the intervening frames. The node tween can be used to make arrows draw out to point at objects in way that scaling the object cannot. For more experienced designers it is alos possible to produce complex animated objects and characters.
Remember that you can use the other object animations on the tween frame so you could create an animation of an animal walking on the spot. Then use the Move Horizontal animation action to move the whole tween across the page making it appear that the animal is walking across the page.
Tweens can also be used as simple timelines – allowing you to set when objects appear or disappear more intuitively.
Opus also provides a range of actions with a number of different options which allow you to build up one or more animations.
These actions can be triggered at any time and are not confined to when the object appears or disappears on screen.
Placing the list of actions in a loop allows you to repeat the actions endlessly.
Opus includes an option to add readymade sets of these animation actions via the QuickAnim tab on the Actions dialog. This simply adds a preset list of actions we have created for you to produce certain popular effects such as pulse effects and so forth. Once added you can edit the constituent actions in the same way as any other Animation actions.
Introducing the Animation Actions
Opus provides an Animation Wizard that allows you to select an object on a page and then apply one of a wide range of animation effects to it. For example, you can make objects pulse, fade in and fade out, bounce around the screen and so on. The wizard allows you to set various options for each effect, thus allowing you to control how the object will be animated.
The QuickAnim tab (above) is a shortform Animation Wizard allowing to apply preset animations.
You can animate objects along paths you have created for them using the Animation Path tool on the Tools toolbar. This tool is often used to illustrate the direction of flow in a process during presentations – or it can just be used for highlights, attention getting or just for fun.
You can add animations created in other programs using Adobe Flash (.SWF) movies and video (.FLV) as well as animated GIFs. These must be added using the Video tool on the Tools toolbar, If you use the Image tool to add GIFs only the first frame will be displayed and it will not animate.