Creating smooth animations for Furcadia can be a pain, especially with alignment. Especially if all the shapes being animated are of different sizes.

To that end is one of the reasons I designed the main interface for FoxEdit the way I did, it's to be able to single pixel nudge the shapes into the position needed for smooth animations. Plus with the list on the left side of the window, you can walk through the shapes and ensure that it's fairly smooth in how it all looks.

But sometime that isn't even enough, getting them to the exact spot needed can turn into a long trial and error, especially if the animation is not one that runs continously, or it runs too fast to locate the frame which is not quite right. There's several ways to fix that, one is to create kitterspeak that runs slowly, or to combine kitterspeak that shows a specific frame, and DS that drives it, stepping through the frames one by one. Along with some indicator of which frame you're on so you can do this without counting your way to that frame.

Of course that also requires you to upload the dream every single time as well.

However, in my case, because I'm using blender to create my objects for animation, I can also use blender to put in something which remains consistant between the frames to aid me in aligning the results. In this case the drawbridge uses shapes which end up being from 37x113 to 108x139, a large difference in sizes, and placement to work smoothly. And there's 19 of them as well. As you can see to the right, I created a purple set of legs to aid me in placing them, the leg on the left is purely to mask out pixels which are hidden by the wall which is supposed to be there to make the drawbridge look good.

As I import each shape into the image editor, I paint out hte background and then all of the left leg, and two faces of the right leg, leaving just the rightmost face behind as my placement aid. This does wonders because no matter how much the shape moves in the animation, that leg is a constant, it's always in the same place each frame. But even that is a tad bit of a headache becuase I don't have a means of placing a pattern shape into the foxeditor's placement window to be able to put each shape in the correct place.

Well, lets take this yet another step. I used ITEM3 to create a 19 shape file with each step in the animation in one of the shapes. I then created a placement tile. I use speciality tiles all the time to aid me in putting stuff together, in this case, I'm taking advantage of that leg to create a tile which contains masking colors to inform me of how much in which direction I need to bump each shape.

Once I've gotten the first image to where I want it, I can then take a screenshot of the dream editor, and paste that into a new image frame with my FLOORE file open. I chop out the floor tile which the placement frame is in and tinker with that to produce a tile which will inform me by color of how off the image is in relationship to the position it needs to be on the tile.

Now, I can put all my shapes down, and then put a placement tile under each one at the correct position, and if the shape is in the right place, I don't see any red and the yellow line under the bottom edge is fully visible as well.

After I get them all into the correct position, I open my ITEME file, and import the shapes from the ITEM3 file into frames. Apply Kitterspeak, and volia, drawbridge.