What can Pixidilly do ?
The purpose of Pixidilly is to create a sequences of animation frames from a single picture.
The animation is produced by moving the pixels of the source picture in different ways.
The effect looks like a pixel dispersion by explosion or as if the pixels were falling .
It is a nice effect for a title sequence or picture transition.
How does it work ?
In Pixidilly you will create a project for each sequence of animation. First, you must define the output pictures size.
You can enter it manually, in this case, you set the width, the height and the background color.
You can also load a background picture, in this case, the project size will be the size of this picture.
Now you can load the source picture. This picture will be the first or last picture of your animation.
You will need to set the number of frames you want in the sequence, between 10 and 1000.
Now you can play with all the other settings to get the effect you want.
Once you have the right effect, you can save the project and the pictures.
The main window is divided into 3 areas : the tabs area, the timeline area and the picture preview.
You have also a standard menu and a status bar in this window.
The tabs area
In the tabs area you will find all the settings controls of your project.
Some tabs are only available in Advanced mode. You can switch to advanced mode by using the Settings-Advanced menu or with the [Advanced] button in the Preset tab.
The next page of this manual will explain what you can do in each tab.
The timeline area
Here you have control of the frame number and what is shown in the picture preview.
The first Edit box lets you set the number of frames in the sequence.
Use the slider to set the number of the frame you want to see.
After you have made changes in the tabs, hit [Refresh] button to see the result.
Hit [Play] button to play all the sequence.
Check [Reverse] checkbox to invert the frame order. Attention : in the tabs the "end" values become "start" values.
The picture preview
The current frame is shown in this area. When you have selected the Distance, Angle, Life or Delay tab, you can clic in the picture to set the position of a control point.
In the Source tab, you can clic in the picture to set the position of the upper-left corner of the source picture.
Fig.1 : Pixidilly interface.
This requester shows when you click on the [Save options...] button.
You can set options for the export file formats in this window.
BMP can be saved in 24 or 32 bit. TGA can be compressed or not, but is always 32 bit.
Jpeg compression can be changed here.