Illusion: A Guide

It is said that you cannot teach creativity, but no one ever said you cannot make software that is creative. This is what Illusion is: a creative software program that will help you enhance your graphic work. Of course you need a computer and a few other things, but for the scope of this manual we are going to assume that you have a computer running Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0 (or higher). You must have at least 32 MB of RAM, (more is better), and a video card that can run in at least 16 bit color at 800 x 600 (24 or 32 bit color is recommended). A special note: Illusion takes advantage of 3D hardware via OpenGL, so if your video card sports 3D hardware with OpenGL support, Illusion will use it. So what else do you need? A little time to go over this Guide so you are productive on your first outing with Illusion!

We know that almost no one ever reads the manual at first; you install the software, launch the application and then ponder the interface of your newly chosen software program. Hopefully you’ve done this already and have played with Illusion a bit. Now we encourage you to take a deep breath and read what has been written here. This Guide is not too long and when it gets too technical or boring, just put it down and play some more until you need a refresher course or want to learn more.

OK let’s begin.

Once upon a time in the land of computer graphics someone decided that “Space the Final Frontier” would be a good place to start using computers to do spiffy graphics and all kinds of unworldly effects. One of the most intriguing aspects of computer graphic animation has to be special effects like Laser Blasts, Photon Torpedoes, Tornadoes, Sand Storms, Explosions and the whole host of cool things that have been thrown at our eyes over the last several years. The only problem with these cool effects is that for the most part they have been almost impossible to do on your everyday base-level PC. If you have the time and the money you can buy the best of the best (and all the plugins that go along with the best) but creating good effects quickly and easily -- well it is just not that easy.

What is Illusion?

Illusion is not a 3D program; it is a 2D program that lives up to its name by creating the Illusion of 3D without the hard work, time, and expense of other 3D programs. Illusion is a REAL TIME, in-your-face effects program that takes very little time to learn and offers an almost endless list of possibilities for your creative talents and chosen work. Illusion is a rendering program, a compositing program and an animation program. You use Illusion WITH other programs but not as a plug-in. You take the output from other programs (3D animation programs, paint programs, digital video sequences) and add Illusion effects to create an even greater masterpiece. (You can also create fantastic animation and images using only Illusion – no other software is required – which you will see once you have become more familiar with it.)

Here is a quick example of something you might do with Illusion. You have been given the task of making a very cool 3D Rocket ship in your trusty 3D program. You must animate it from launch to its travel into outer space. Easy enough – you make your 3D model, animate it, and then you realize there is something missing. There is no billowing smoke cloud as the space ship hurtles itself into space. So here you sit with a great animation that needs a bit more spice to push it over the edge, to add that extra level of realism, to make it really cool. You could at this point go back to your 3D program and fuss around for hours or days trying to make billowing white clouds of rocket blasts, with fire and all the other cool stuff that happens when a rocket is launched. Or you simply make the animation without all these needed effects, and then load the animation or series of stills into Illusion and let Illusion take over. You click on the “white billowing smoke” emitter, load in the animation you just created, click on the area where you want the smoke to come from (probably the business end of the rocket). Then as the rocket ship moves toward the uncharted frontier of space, you simply move the emitter along, creating key frames where the emitter should be over time. Then push the play button and let Illusion do the rest. It really is that easy. But first you need to know a few key concepts. In brief:

Particles: Particles are the visible entities in Illusion. You have no direct control over individual particles – once they are “born” they behave based on the values set in their Particle Type.

Particle Type: A particle type is the collection of properties that determine how particles of this type look and behave. A particle type consists of an image (or images), a color gradient, and various properties such as velocity, size, weight, etc.

Emitters: An emitter is not visible, but is the object that particles emit from. Emitters come in 3 basic types: point, line, and ellipse (circle). An emitter contains one or more particle types, and “global” duplicates of many of the particle type properties (velocity, size, etc.). Emitters, unlike particles, can be directly controlled and moved over time.

So an emitter is made up of particle types, and particle types are made from images, and particles are created by the emitter based on the properties of its particle types. Understand? If not, it will become clearer once we cover these things in more detail. There are two more objects that are possible in Illusion: deflectors and blockers.

Deflectors: A deflector is an invisible (or visible) barrier that particles collide with. Deflectors are line segments or a series of line segments.

Blockers: A blocker is an area that you define on the stage in which particles are not visible.

Now it seems would be a good time to start looking at some pictures and a more detailed explanation of Illusion. Let’s start at the beginning – the point you have probably already seen – the Illusion interface.

The Illusion Interface

The Illusion interface is divided into 6 basic windows.

1. Layers Window. Where you add, delete and arrange layers used in the project.

2. Hierarchy Window. Where you can control the various aspects of the animation functions of an emitter and the particle types of the emitter.

3. The Stage. Where it all comes together, this is where you see any background images you have added, and the symbolic representation of any emitters, deflectors, and blockers in the project. The gray outline represents the stage area, which is the area in which particles are visible, and is the area that will be saved when saving output.

4. Graph Window. Here you control various functions of emitters and particles over time.

5. Library Window. Shows the list of emitters that you are currently working with. Emitters in the library are available for adding to the stage with just a mouse click or two.

6. Preview Window. The emitter that is selected in the library window is displayed here. You may click and drag in this window to get an idea of how the emitter behaves before adding it to your project.

You can adjust the sizes of all of these windows by moving the mouse over the edge of the dividing line between the windows and simply dragging the divider. The window size that is most important is that of the stage window. The stage window must be large enough to fit the dimensions of the project you intend to work on, at least when saving output. For example, if you are working on a 640x480 project, the stage window must be at least 640x480, or you will not be able to save your output full-size.

There are many other dialogs and mouse conditions that you will need to learn to get the most from Illusion. Instead of taking the time honored tradition of boring you to death with an explanation of each function, we thought it more appropriate to walk through a tutorial set that would show you, step by step on how to use each function. Follow these tutorials as they are set up and when you come to the end of the tutorials you will be an informed user of Illusion.

Tutorial #1

The Easy Stuff

We’ll start with something really simple. Select the “Heavy Fire Sparkles” emitter from the library window (the library window is #5 from above).

Simply L-click on the words “Heavy Fire Sparkles” and it will be highlighted.

This action is called selecting a library emitter. An emitter stays selected until you choose a different emitter, and only one emitter can be selected at a time.

Note that when you select a library emitter the preview window activates and shows you what the emitter is going to look like when it is animated.

Here the Heavy Fire Sparkles emitter is shown in the preview window. Click and drag around the preview window to get a feel for what the selected library emitter will look like when added to the stage.

Now move your mouse to the stage. Click once near middle of the stage and a small white circle will appear.

This circle is the symbol for an emitter (a “point” emitter actually, but we’ll cover that later).

Now for the fun part. Click the PLAY button on the playback toolbar.

Next to the PLAY button is a small window with a number in it: the frame box. The frame box indicates the current frame number, and will change during playback.

The stage should be showing you the fire sparkles emanating from the emitter that you added, the numbers in the frame box should be going up, and you should be reasonably pleased with your performance so far.

Stop it!

You have probably noticed that the play button changes to the STOP button when you clicked to start playback:

Click on the STOP button now. Your animation will stop and you will see what frame it stopped on in the frame box. (The STOP button will now have changed back into the PLAY button.) There are some other buttons on the playback toolbar. The button to the left of the PLAY button is the REWIND button. The smaller black arrow buttons to the right of the frame box move you forward or backward one frame at a time, and the button that is a red circle is the RECORD button (more on that button in a minute).

Click REWIND. You should be at frame 1. Using the mouse, select the number in the frame box and type “30”. This will jump you to frame 30. (There are other ways to jump to different frames which we will cover later.) Now press PLAY again. Playback always starts from the frame number that is displayed in the frame box. Stop the playback (using the STOP button). Now, press the REWIND button once. You’ll see that the frame box displays 30. Click REWIND again. Now the frame box displays 1. What’s going on? The REWIND button jumps back to the frame that playback last started at when clicked the first time, then jumps back to frame 1 when clicked again. (Clicking it again alternates between the playback start frame and frame 1.)

Now let’s make a movie. This will be a short movie just to show you how to make one.

Making The First Movie

Click the RECORD button and you will see is a dialog box that looks something like this:

This is a standard Windows Save dialog, so use it as you would in any other program. At the top choose the folder where you want to save your first movie. In the file name area at the bottom of the dialog you need first to decide on how you are going to save the movie. For this tutorial you will save it as an AVI file, but for future reference you can save animations as image sequences (a series of numbered images). The options for various file formats are found by clicking on the Save as Type, down arrow, which will show you a dialog that looks like this.

As you can see the first option is AVI. There are also several image formats from which you can choose. Move the mouse down until the AVI format is selected. Now type into the file name area, “FIREMOVIE” and click OK. The AVI extension will be added for you.

(Note that the AVI format is assumed if you don’t choose a file format.)

The next dialog that you will see is the Output Options dialog. We’ll use this to set the start and end frame numbers of your animation, and ignore the other controls for now.

For this tutorial, set the start at 1 and the end frame to 30.

Now click on the OK button.

The next dialog you will see is the AVI Options dialog, which allows you to set the codec (compressor/decompressor) that you wish to use, as well as other compression settings. Each codec has different controls so we won’t cover any of them here. Just use the codec that you are most familiar with for this tutorial.

Choose the Compressor you want to use with the drop down arrow at the top of the dialog, and set the other functions as you see fit. It really doesn’t make much difference for this tutorial; all we really want is a movie to look at, right? Click on OK and playback will start. The difference is that Illusion is saving the AVI during playback. Note that the RECORD button has been replaced with the STOP button. If you press it, you will be asked if you want to stop the output. If you answer “yes” the movie creation will stop (the movie will still exist) and so will playback. If you answer “no” then the movie creation (and playback) will continue.

After a few moments depending on the speed of your computer, you will see Illusion create the epic adventure of FIREMOVIE. Actually it is a pretty lame movie but at least you now know how to go about making a movie.

Let’s Get Moving!

Well now it’s time to get a bit more creative with the emitter. Let’s move it around the screen a little and create our second movie.

To make an emitter move in Illusion you simply create position key frames (or “position keys”) at the position and frame that you want. But first…

KEY FRAME… CONCEPT DISCUSSION…. Every person who has animated anything either with a computer or without has had to use the concept of a key frame. Key frames are nothing more than a point at where you make the decision as to what happens – the computer creates the information between key frames for you. There are no special keystrokes that you must use in order to establish a key frame – change something from one frame to the next and you have created a key frame.

Okay, now how to do it in Illusion.

In this example we’ll want to make the emitter start at one point at frame 1, then move to another point over the next 30 frames. First click the REWIND button until you’re back at frame 1. Now move the emitter to the point on the stage that you want it to start at. There are three different ways to move an emitter. The fastest way when there are few emitters on the stage is to click on the emitter symbol (small circle on the stage) and drag it around. We’ll cover the other ways in a minute. So click and drag the emitter to somewhere near the upper left corner of the stage. Now change the current frame from 1 to 30. You could do this by typing 30 into the frame box as before, but let’s try a better way.

The window below the stage window is the graph window. At most times the graph window will display a series of numbers along the bottom of the window. These are frame numbers. You can jump to any frame shown in the graph window by just clicking on the frame number you want.

You must click on the frame number and not the graph area above the frame numbers.

So click on the 30 in the graph window. You should see the current frame indicator (the gray button with the red number on it and the vertical red line) jump to the frame you clicked. If you don’t get exactly the frame you hoped to (for instance 29 instead of 30) there’s an easy solution: you can drag the current frame indicator left and right until it shows the frame number (in red) that you want.

Okay, so now we are at frame 30. Click and drag the emitter (on the stage) to the upper right corner of the stage. You should notice two things. First, the graph window now shows two points and a horizontal line. This indicates that a position key (or position key frame) has been created at frame 30 (there is always a position key at frame 1). Second, there is now a dotted line on the stage connecting the positions of the emitter.

Each dot represents the position of the emitter at a frame. The larger dot at the left end of the dotted line indicates a position key (the position of the emitter at frame 1 in this case). The dot immediately to its right is the position of the emitter at frame 2.

Now grab the current frame indicator (the red frame in the graph window) and drag it to the left. As the frame number changes, the stage updates to show the position of the emitter at each frame. Want to know another way to change the current frame? So far we have 3 methods: 1) use the frame box, 2) use the frame box up/down buttons, 3) click on the frame numbers in the graph window. There are two more ways to change the current frame. The LEFT ARROW key on the keyboard will move to the previous frame, and the RIGHT ARROW key will move to the next frame. Since we now have more than one position key for this emitter, we can also use a keyboard shortcut to jump between the position key frame numbers. Use the UP ARROW to jump to the frame of the previous position key for this emitter, and the DOWN ARROW key to jump to the frame of the next position key for this emitter.

Okay, REWIND to frame 1 and click PLAY (Ctrl+R is the keyboard shortcut for REWIND, and Ctrl+Space is the shortcut for PLAY and STOP). You should see the emitter moving from the upper left to the upper right corner of the stage, emitting particles as it goes.

STOP playback and we’ll make another position key at frame 60 using one of the other methods of moving an emitter: the MOVE function. Jump to frame 60 (using any method) and click the MOVE button on the main toolbar:

The mouse cursor changes to a crosshair shape, and jumps to the current position of the emitter on the stage. Don’t click any mouse buttons yet – just move the emitter around the stage. Okay, R-click to cancel the move operation and you’ll see the emitter move back to its original position. Click MOVE again (or press M) and position the emitter at the lower right corner of the stage. This time L-click instead of R-clicking and a new position key has now been created. One thing you’ll notice is that the dots connecting this new line segment on the stage are closer together that the dots on the previous segment. This tells you that the emitter will move more slowly over this second segment.

We’ll look at this in a later example, but for now just realize that the “density” of dots gives you some indication of how fast the emitter is moving.

Okay, so why would you ever want to use MOVE to move an emitter when you can just click on it and drag it on the stage? Well there may be cases where you have two emitters in nearly the same location on the stage and you just can’t click on the one you want. MOVE is very useful in this case. Another place where MOVE comes in handy is when using Copy and Paste, but we’ll cover that later.

A quick summary of making an emitter move in Illusion: 1) set the frame number 2) set the position of the emitter on the stage. If you move an emitter and a position key does not exist at that frame, one will always be created. If you move an emitter while at a frame for which a position key already exists, the position will be modified.

Save Me!

One last thing we need to do to wrap up this tutorial: SAVE the project! To save the Illusion project (which is not the same thing as when we created and saved an AVI earlier) select Save or Save As from the File menu, or click the SAVE button on the main toolbar. The Save As function will always open the standard Windows Save dialog so you can choose an existing filename or enter a new filename. The Save function will open this same dialog but only this is a new project that has not been saved yet. If it has been saved or has been loaded from an existing project, then this will just save the project without letting you change the name. (Note that this will wipe out the previous version of the file, so be careful.)