Brian Carl Bahr
Professional Draftsman


Autodesk Animator

  This program is where you pull everything together.


screenshot source: http://annarella.dk/grafik/gamle_animationer/autodesk_animator.gif


This was actually a very in depth program for its function. It was truly ahead of it time (well on the PC anyway, we will ignore Macintosh for now). Before this program we only had worthless junk like PC-Paintbrush. This was probably reflected in the price as I remember it retailing for about US 700$ in 1991. It had many features, I never did learn them all. It has cells, still and animated, then the animations could again be animated. There were text features, macro features for programming your own effects and even some 2.5D effects (like the swirling cardinal below). It also had an intuitive interface of which I had never seen and really have never seen again except maybe some shadows of it in QCAD.


CARDNIAL.FLI - November 1st, 1991

This movie is a simple animation with just two files used. One is an AutoSHADE rendering of a model I built in AutoCAD and the other is a Scan of a Cardinal (Because that was my schools Mascot). The 3D distortion is done all within Animator. The little flash of light at the end was a manually drawn animation that was then inserted over the final animation as a cell. This type of animation could have be done totaly in Animator as a stand alone package.


X-10B.FLI - Febuary 16th, 1992

This movie is a much more complex animation with many files used. One is an AutoSHADE rendering of an AutoFLIX animation (9 hours to render the single 360 rotation of the Space Fighter on a 16 mhz 386). Another was, I believe, a direct AutoCAD to FLI dump from AutoFLIX (The Skeleton). The rest were Miscellaneous manually drawn touch ups or animation called Cells, used just like real animation cells (celluloids?) all mixed and keyed together in Animator all in MS-DOS, all single tasked. This movie was done all without 3d Studio using only the old Autodesk animation tools!!


how do I play these FLI movies?
These movies can be played with any number of shaware or GPL applications. I know that both of these files will work with XINE.

bahr@seclorum.us