First impressions
OK, so me and the other 88,000 people that bought the MacHeist 3 bundle are starting to look at kinemac, a real-time 3D compositing and animation program. It had the biggest price tag of any app in the bundle weighing in at $300. Is it worth it? Based on what I’ve seen, I’d have to say yes!
I have Motion 2.0 from the original Final Cut Studio suite. I’ve used it for a few things, but never really got the hang of it. While you could preview things in real time, it felt sluggish at times, especially when you tried to change anything.
After trying some of the sample kinemac projects, I found that when they say “real time”, they mean it. It’s amazing how snappy the playback is. I was selecting things and fiddling with things, and the app kept smoothly rendering as if I were playing a game. Pretty cool stuff.
Getting Started
Let’s fire up the app so I can explore a little. It looks like we have four main areas in view. There’s a toolbar at the top. A stage just below. A sprite/timeline area below that, and an inspector area on the right.
The inspector feels familiar from using the apps in the iLife and iWork suites.
From the toolbar, you can switch between the selection and the pen tool. There are buttons for adding and importing 2D and 3D sprites. You can group sprites, add cameras, and lighting. You can go to fullscreen as well as hiding everything but the stage.
Let’s animate something!
I want to do something like move a cube around. How should we do this? It looks like we need to add keyframes to the timeline. We can set the keyframes by going to the inspector and clicking on one of the keyframe icons. We can advance the playhead, change something about the sprite in question and then add another keyframe.
Keyframes in the timeline are draggable. To move between keyframes hit the Tab key. To get rid of a keyframe, you have to go to the inspector and “option click” the keyframe icon that you’d like to get rid of. There are more details on the kinemac site.
Let’s animate something better!
OK, animating something in 3D was neat, but my lack of artistic skill is shining through. There must be a better way of doing this. Let’s take a look at one of the sample projects (kinemac_ring).
If you select a sprite (or sprite group/folder) and then press Command-3, you’ll bring up a window that let’s you vary the animation of each parameter using a Bezier curve. It looks like their animations are using nice smooth curves.
It also looks like by grouping sprites, you’ll be able to apply an animation to the entire group and have any nested animations work as expected. Keyframes in the timeline only appear when animated objects are selected.
Add images to objects
OK, the animated cube is much smoother now, but it’s pretty boring. Let’s drag my company’s logo onto one of the faces of the cube and see what happens…Wow, my logo is moving and rotating in space! That’s awesome. Here’s what it looks like:
Going Forward
Well, I think I understand the basics of this app now—at least enough to learn from the example files on kinemac’s site. I’ll write more when I use kinemac to redo the overview screencast for my company’s flagship product.
Feel free to comment!
