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7. The Menus / 7.9 The Web Menu

### 7.9.5 Create Animation

Often it is a lot of work to create an animation for the web. If you wanted to scroll a text from the top to the middle, you first have to create the text. Then you have to copy the layer, shift it a view pixels down, copy it again, shift it down again and so on. You have to do this until you reach the middle. And if you have to change the text, you have to begin from the start once more. But our example is a quite simple animation.

To create more complicated animations manually is nearly impossible. Therefore there is the function Create Animation, that eases work like this. It offers the following features to animate a layer:

- move a layer in a certain direction
- scale a layer
- rotate a layer around its center
- fade a layer in or out

Of course you can combine these effects.

In order to view the result of your settings, there is a Preview-function, which calls Animate Layers (see chapter 7.9.2).

If you leave the Create Animation-dialog by pressing OK, PhotoLine will create as many layers as entered in the Steps-field. These layers are the single steps of the animation. The radio buttons define, what kind of layers will be generated. There are the following choices:

- Scale Layers Virtually
This option creates copies of the active layers and modifies them only virtually, that means the content of the layer keeps unchanged. That has the advantage, that the animation can be created very quickly. Change Layers Virtually is most useful, if you wanted to create a delete-animation.
- Create Alpha Images
The result of this option are image layers containing an alpha channel which are not rotated and not scaled. This option is useful, if you wanted to create a delete-animation and to edit the single steps with the image tools.
- Create "Overwrite"-Animation
This option is used for creating overwrite-animations. As a result you get unscaled and unrotated image layers. None of these layers - except the first one - has an alpha channel and they overlap completely the previous layer. The overlapping is very important for overwrite-animations in order to delete all parts of the previous animation steps.
- Create Group
This is a special option used to create complex animations. The result is a group, that contains the animation steps. The idea behind that is to create several partial animations, each one in a separate group.

The current position and intensity of the layer is the start state for the animation. In the subdialogs you have to define, how to change the layer. This means, you have to define the end state. Some subdialogs are containing a curve field to modify this behaviour. If you want to edit this curve, you should keep in mind, that the bottom edge of the curve field corresponds to the start state and the top edge corresponds to the end state. The effect of some exemplary curves are explained in the following:

: The animation will be running from the start state to the end state.

: The animation will be running from the end state to the start state.

: The animation will be running from the start state to the end state and back again to the start state.

All the subdialogs containing a curve field contain a switch Use Global Curve, too. If you turn that on and change the curve, all curves in the other subdialogs, with that switch turned on, will be changed, too.

In the subdialog Move you can control, how to move the layer. Direction defines the direction. You have the choice between the four corners, straight to the top, straight to the bottom, straight to the left, straight to the right and headed to the center. Distance defines which part of this distance is covered. 100% means, that the target is reached, 0% means, that the layer doesn’t move at all.

Scale defines, how to scale the layer. It is possible to enter a negative value. In this case, the layer will be mirrored.

If a layer is reduced in size, the resulting animation looks like a 3-dimensional movement backwards.

You can adjust, that the layer should only be scaled horizontally or only vertically. In combination with a negative scaling (mirroring) this can be used to simulate a rotation around the x- or y-axis.

Rotate defines, whether the layer shall be rotated in the animation. The layer can be rotated clockwise and counterclockwise.

Intensity creates the fading in or out of a layer.