Methods and apparatus for supporting and implementing computer based animation
The present invention provides a method for hierarchically decomposing a visual or audio object within an animation into plurality of objects which can be individually edited to achieve particular animation effects. For example, a graphical object may be decomposed into a plurality of graphical sub-objects, each of which inherits an anchor point from the original object, or is given an original anchor point distinct from the original object. Each sub-object also includes a relative position for the sub-object relative to the anchor point. The path of the anchor point is combined with relative positions of the sub-objects to produce an animation for the object as a whole. This decomposition technique can greatly increase computational efficiency of an animation. It also provides for inheritance of attributes between objects and descendent sub-objects. The objects may support functions, or behaviors, such as morphing or motion blurring. The present invention additionally provides a flexible grouping operation to facilitate modifications to a group of objects. When a first type of modification is made to an attribute of an object in a group, this change is applied to corresponding attributes of other objects in the group. When a second type of modification is made to an attribute of an object in a group, the change only applies to the selected object or objects, and not to other objects in the group. The present invention allows objects to be manipulated on servers which are connected to a display on the internet.
1. A method of editing a sequence of an animated text sequence, the method comprising:
identifying a sentient item that can logically be associated with a text comment;
recognizing a coarse grain pattern by further identifying the most meaningful areas of the image and assigning to each such identified area the location of the rectangular area enclosing each such identified area hereafter referred to as a starting point of interest in order to position the start of the animated text effectively;
further recognizing where the least meaningful areas of the image are located and the corresponding location of the rectangular area enclosing each such identified area hereafter referred to as an ending point of interest in order to position the end of the animated text sequence effectively;
creating a scenario wherein each point of interest can be a starting point of interest or an ending point of interest in relation with an animated text sequence;
evaluating said scenario evaluation along by choosing a criteria from the group of: distance between the starting point of interest and the ending point of interest, relative positioning between the starting point of interest and the ending point of interest, dimensions of the corresponding most meaningful area and least meaningful area;
scoring said scenarios according to an evaluation function; and
rendering the animated image for each scenario, starting with the one with the best evaluation score, and determining the scenario to retain and inputting a sequence of text characters from a form on a web browser.
2. A method of editing a sequence as in claim 1 , wherein said animated text sequence is static.