INTRODUCTION

The Animation Toolkit contains simple programs that have been written to support the integration of animations, which have been created using dedicated tools such as Adobe After Effects, into other software.

At the moment, the toolkit merely consists of a single command-line tool.

SOFTWARE LICENSE

The Animation Toolkit is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The Animation Toolkit is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with The Animation Toolkit. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

INSTALLATION

Download the most recent Mac OS X Installer Package. Double click the installer (.mpkg file) and follow the instructions on screen. This will install the basic tools into the folder /opt/animationtoolkit/bin. If you would like to remove the installed files later again, simply follow the instructions below.

Automator Workflows which automate and simplify the use of these basic tools can be installed separately by downloading the The Animation Toolkit Workflows package for Mac OS X users.

Other installer packages can be downloaded from here. At the moment, only installers for Intel 64-bit Apple computers running Mac OS X >=10.7 are provided. The Animation Toolkit has to be built from sources on other platforms.

To be able to process video files, the ffmpeg command of FFmpeg must be installed. For example, download the FFmpeg Static Builds by tessus for Mac OS X and extract the archive to /opt/animationtoolkit/bin. Therefore, you will need the 7zX archiving tool.

BASIC TOOLS

The tools provided by The Animation Toolkit have to be executed in a command window such as the Terminal application on Mac OS X or the Command Prompt on Microsoft Windows. Users of Linux systems will likely be familiar with their command shell and know how to run the following commands. Others may refer to the documentation of their respective operating system.

crop-frames

crop-frames: [options] -i animation.mov  -o frames.png [-c coords.csv]
             [options] -i frames_%6d.png -o frames.png [-c coords.csv]

This program can be used to crop all frames of an image sequence such as an animation. All frames of the sequence are expected to have the same size. Each frame is by default cropped to the smallest possible bounding box. A CSV file with the minimum and maximum pixel indices of the region used to crop each frame is optionally stored along with the cropped images. Additionally, relative pixel offsets for the center of the bounding boxes are computed and stored in the CSV file. This allows the recovery of the global animation from the cropped image sequence.

-i <file>         Input sequence, e.g., movie.mov or movie_%05d.png.
-o <file>         Output sequence, e.g., cropped.mov or cropped.png.
-c <file>         Output CSV spreadsheet for pixel coordinates.
-b <index>        Index of first frame of image sequence.
-s <n>            Increment/Stride of image frame indices.
-e <index>        Index of last frame of image sequence.
-u <false|true>   Crop all images using the union of all bounding boxes.
-f <false|true>   Crop all images using a fixed size bounding box.
-v <int>          Verbosity of output messages (0: none, 1: status, 2: debug).

BUILDING THE SOFTWARE FROM SOURCES

Dependencies

The Animation Toolkit includes a copy of the CImg Library, which is extended using the plugin framework of the library. In order to read and write PNG, JPEG, and/or TIFF images, the respective libraries must be installed on the system.

Build Steps

The steps to build and install the software are as follows:

Extract source files.
Run CMake to configure the build tree.
Build the software using selected build tool.
Test the built software.
Install the built files.

On Unix-like systems with GNU Make as build tool, these build steps can be summarized by the following sequence of commands executed in a shell.

$ tar xzf AnimationToolkit-1.2-source.tar.gz
$ cd AnimationToolkit-1.2-source
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ make install (optional)

To configure the build interactively with ccmake instead of cmake as shown above, for example to change the installation directory,

press 'c' to configure the build system and 'e' to ignore warnings,
set CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX and other CMake variables and options,
continue pressing 'c' until the option 'g' is available,
then press 'g' to generate the configuration files for GNU Make.

CMake Options

CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX: Root directory used for the installation of the tools.

DEINSTALLATION

To remove the files of The Animation Toolkit again, open a Terminal window and type the following command and press enter. It will require your user password. If you have write permissions to the /opt directory, the sudo can be omitted.

sudo rm -rf /opt/animationtoolkit

schuhschuh/AnimationToolkit