External Module

Retired Products Animate Support and Troubleshooting
1

I need your help guys… I dont understand how can I use the External module of the Animate Pro… Could you plz help me with that

I also need your help with another issue… I would like to finish my drawings using more drawing-dedicated software, Photoshop mainly, but when I do so, and then import my drawings to Animate Pro, I am unable to edit the shape of my drawings with the Contour Editor tool and this is one the most important tools for me… any advice on this issue

Thanks in advance

2

Are you on Harmony or Animate Pro? On Harmony you can go to the help page 943 for a good explanation.

Here are screen grabs of the doc if you are on AP.

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/9932/screenshot001sv.jpg
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/7488/screenshot002db.jpg

You can’t edit a bitmap texture with the Contour Editor. You can only use cutter, select, perspective, eraser tools.

3

um using animate pro

the screen grabs that you provided are similar to the ones in the animate pro user guide… however, um still unable of applying this effect… dont know why

4

What is it that you want to achieve with an External Module?

5

I cant understand what exactly the module does

6

It’s a module that permits you to do some effect or image processing that you can not do in Animate Pro but another program can.

It takes an image from Animate pro, makes a bitmap of it and then sends it to the other program. The other program processes that image, does a twirl for example, then sends back the result in Animate Pro’s network.

It allows you to not have to render an image, open it in the other program, modify it , save and then re-import the result as a new layer in Animate Pro.

There are certain condition for it to work though. You need to have an external program that works on bitmap images and most importantly that you can call from a command line. For example Photoshop could do that external processing if we could start it in command line, which to my knowledge we can not. That’s why they suggest ImageMagic as an example because that one you can pass a command line with options.

Some big studios have actually created their own image processing program and then they can use this module.

What you write in the fields of the module depends on the syntax that the external program demands. For example, program_name -option value filename.