Autodesk Animator is a 2D computer animation and painting program published in 1989 for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

. It was considered groundbreaking when initially released.Graphics - Winner: Autodesk Animator
''"Robert Bennett, Lewis Gartenberg, David Kalish, Jim Kent, Jack Powell, Gary Yost"'' on pcmag.com (1989)

Functionality

Animator gave the ability to do frame-by-frame animation (creating each frame as an individual picture, much like

Traditional animation Traditional animation (or classical animation, cel animation, or hand-drawn animation) is an animation technique in which each frame is drawn by hand. The technique was the dominant form of animation in cinema until computer animation. Proc ...

) . Animator Studio also had

tweening Inbetweening, also known as tweening, is a process in animation that involves creating intermediate frames, called inbetweens, between two keyframes. The intended result is to create the illusion of movement by smoothly transitioning one image i ...

features (transforming one shape into another by letting the computer draw each in-between shape onto a separate frame). Animator and Animator Pro supported FLI and FLC animation file formats, while Animator Studio also supported the AVI format. Animator was particular strong in Palette based editing, effects (like

Color cycling Color cycling, also known as palette shifting, is a technique used in computer graphics in which colors are changed in order to give the impression of animation. This technique was mainly used in early computer games, as storing one image and cha ...

) and animations a favored technology in the time of indexed CGA and VGA

graphics mode Computer display standards are a combination of aspect ratio, display size, display resolution, color depth, and refresh rate. They are associated with specific expansion cards, video connectors and monitors. History Various computer displ ...

s. Unlike other DOS software from that time, Animator was not restricted by the 640 kilobyte

conventional memory In DOS memory management, conventional memory, also called base memory, is the first 640 kilobytes of the memory on IBM PC or compatible systems. It is the read-write memory directly addressable by the processor for use by the operating system ...

limitation as it utilized a

DOS extender A DOS extender is a computer software program running under DOS that enables software to run in a protected mode environment even though the host operating system is only capable of operating in real mode. DOS extenders were initially develope ...

Phar Lap Phar Lap (4 October 1926 – 5 April 1932) was a champion New Zealand–bred Thoroughbred racehorse who is widely regarded as New Zealand's greatest racehorse ever. Achieving incredible success during his distinguished career, his initial u ...

. Animator's combination of twenty tools multiplied by twenty inks, 3D 'optics,' unparalleled palette handling, custom fonts and many other useful features (such as its own internal

scripting language A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripting ...

POCO), put it many years ahead of better known animation tools of the time.

Development history

''Animator'' originates back to its author's

Jim Kent William James Kent (born February 10, 1960) is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects and the 2003 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award. Early life Kent was born in Hawa ...

earlier program ''Cyber Paint'' for the Atari ST.The Antic Cyber Graphics Software and the Pre-History of Autodesk 3D Studio and Discreet 3ds max
Asterius.com. Retrieved on 2013-04-22.

evolved in 1989 his software into ''Animator'' for Gary Yost's "Yost Group" for

80286 The Intel 80286 (also marketed as the iAPX 286 and often called Intel 286) is a 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced on February 1, 1982. It was the first 8086-based CPU with separate, non- multiplexed address and data buses and also the ...

PCs with

.The First Pioneer in PC Animation: Autodesk Animator
by Dr. Mussy ''"October – November, marks an interesting anniversary for animation: 21 years ago, animation became available for the PC platform."'' (November 8, 2010) ''Animator'' was then licensed to

Autodesk Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartere ...

, who published the software as ''Autodesk Animator''.

Releases

''Animator'' was debuted at SIGGRAPH 1989, featuring a VGA

of 320×200 pixels with

256 colors 8-bit color graphics are a method of storing image information in a computer's memory or in an image file, so that each pixel is represented by 8 bits (1 byte). The maximum number of colors that can be displayed at any one time is 256 or 28. Color ...

. In July 1991, the successor Animator Pro was released, with the significant improvement of allowing almost any resolution and color depth. The software was sold for approx. $800, significantly more expensive than the previous version, addressing the professional audience. The 1995 released Animator Studio was a complete re-write for

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...

, but was not anymore developed by the Yost Group.

Abandonment and legacy

Eventually development of the product ended and support was discontinued by Autodesk. The

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from othe ...

for "Autodesk Animator", filed on December 18, 1989, expired on July 21, 1997. Jim Kent kept

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

s to the 300,000 lines

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

base of Animator Pro, and allowed it to be made available publicly under the open-source

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

in 2009.animator pro
on GitHub ''"All source code (unless otherwise marked, or if better information becomes available) is ©1989-1994 Jim Kent and is available here under the BSD license"'' The original 256 color ''Animator'' version for DOS is also provided as a

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

download. After some initial

code review Code review (sometimes referred to as peer review) is a software quality assurance activity in which one or several people check a program mainly by viewing and reading parts of its source code, and they do so after implementation or as an interr ...

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

to modern platforms was started on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

. As of April 2014 most of the assembly language source code had been ported to platform-agnostic C code and SDL was used as the target back-end framework.

Reception

Animator was considered to be groundbreaking in the field of computer animation when it was initially released. In 1989 Animator won '' PC Magazine''s "6th Annual Technical Excellence Award for Graphics". Also, video game developers used the software for intros and other animated sequences in their games, for instance Formula One Grand Prix (1991, MicroProse),

Cannon Fodder Cannon fodder is an informal, derogatory term for combatants who are regarded or treated by government or military command as expendable in the face of enemy fire. The term is generally used in situations where combatants are forced to deliberatel ...

(1993,

Virgin Interactive Virgin Interactive Entertainment (later renamed Avalon Interactive) was the video game publishing division of British conglomerate the Virgin Group. It developed and published games for major platforms and employed developers, including Westwo ...

) and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (1998, Epic Games). Animator Studio attempted to do more than previous versions of the program, yet it had limited success. It also lost the ergonomic fluidity that the DOS versions had. Animator Pro, though, was by far the most useful, and was exceptionally fast compared with today's animation programs. The program worked so well and had enough of an impact, that it convinced James Cameron that CGI could create a character in his next film, '' Terminator 2: Judgment Day''; Autodesk did advertisement with this. There were also books written about Animator for instance "Inside Autodesk Animator: The Complete Guide to Animation on a PC" by New Riders Publishing in 1990.

References

External links

*
Animator (1989)
Freeware download via

Gallery with examples of Animator created animations
{{Autodesk products 2D animation software Autodesk discontinued products 1989 software Formerly proprietary software Freeware 3D graphics software Free 3D graphics software Commercial software with available source code