This is the first Jahshaka tutorial, and will be cleaned up later after we add the manual, when the Jahshaka.org site is finished. It is focused on getting started and creating your first movie! Its very rough but dont worry we will add pictures when we clean it up!

Download the tutorial file here: animation_tutorial.zip

The first thing you will need to do is run the latest version of Jahshaka, as of this time that is Jahshaka 2.0RC3.

THE DESKTOP

Once Jahshaka has started, you should be facing a blank desktop. Similar to your linux or windows desktop, this is where you manage all your media!

First step is to load a few clips onto the desktop. We will start with the clips in your Media folder.

1. Click the Load Clip button on the bottom of the blank desktop.
2. double click on Images
3. select beck.bmp


You shold now see Beck on the desktop... you can grab him and drag him around to make way for a few more clips you will need to load in.

Follow the same procedure above for the following clips:

earthtex.bmp, espn.bmp, espninterface.bmp and font.png

*be careful when dragging the font and espninterface around since you cant click on the invisible areas of the clip it may seem difficult.

If you loaded the wrong clip you can select it and hit delete. Dont worry, this wont actually erase the file - it will still be on disk for you to load back in later on if you like. Delete will only erase renders and we will get to that later on.

THE PLAYER

Ok, now you have some clips loaded up you can take a look at them in the player. You can do this by selecting each clip and hitting the Play Clip button. To return to the desktop, just click desktop in the left menu.

ANIMATION

Our next step will be to create a simple animation - a open for the jahshaka promotion on ESPN!

To do this, first you need to get into the Animation Module, so click on Animation in the left menu. This brings you to the Animation module.

You will see a player box, a slider and a few green lcd boxes. This is where you set up your scene. If you look at the horizontal tabs, you will see that you are in the SCENE tab. You can always come back here to change the scene - and everything is non-destructuv so dont worry.

First thing we want to do is set the End Frame to 3 seconds. To do this, just click on the end frame lcd display and drag slowly to the left until the numbers read 00:03:00

You will notice that you can now select the diamond shaped slider in the middle of the screen and drag it from left to right, this is how you move through the scene or 'scrub' it.

Now, lets save the scene out just hit the save button, and type in a name ending in .jsf (thats jahshaka scene file) and then hit return. I will call mine espn.jsf

GRABING IMAGES FROM THE DESKTOP

Ok, now for the fun part, lets grab a image from the desktop!

You will notice that the default layer is called World. To see it in action, simply check the small box to the left of it. You should see the background light up with a empty layer image. Thats the default image for all layers when you add them.

We want to set the background to be the beck image we loaded in earlier on, so make sure that the World layer is selected. You can do this by clicking on the World text and it should light up.

If you look to the right side of the screen, you should see a button called Get Desktop. This button lets you grab a image from the desktop into any selected layer.

With the world selected (it should be if you clicked on it and its highlighted in white) click on the get desktop button.

You will notice that the top half of the screen switched over to the desktop, but the bottom half is the animation module - this is to remind you where you are. If you get confused, just hit the animation button in the left menu and try again.

In order to grab the clipo, just click on the beck image. It should light up with a blue border around it. You will also see that the get desktop button is now red, and has changed to RETURN. Once you have selected beck, hit return.

You should now be back in the animation module, with beck as you background.

ADDING LAYERS

That was real easy, right! This is how you load clips into all the modules.

Now lets fill the scene out with a few more layers. To do this, you will see a button to the left of the world layer called ADD. Click on this button a a menu pops up with a few choices... were going to just add another layer for now, so click on the Layer option and you should see a small empty layer pop up on top of the background.

Fo]llow the same steps ypu followed to grab beck from the desktop, but this time highlight the empty Layer in thelyaers box first. This time we will be grabbing the earthtex image. So hit GRAB DESKTOP, select the earth texture, and hit RETURN.

Once your are back, you will see that you can click on the picture of the earth with your mouse and move it around.

OBJECTS AND TRANSLATION

We want to change this from a flat layer to a ball so it actually looks like the earh. In order to do this we need to get into the object properties box. To do this, click on the OBJECT tab, to the right of the SCENE tab.

You will see some options here, we are going to click on Sphere.

Now the earth layer actually looks like the earth! You can play around with moving and rotating it by clicking on the vertical tools to the left of the screen. The top one is move and the one underneath is rotate. The last one is scale.

You can also move the object around more accuratly using the AXIS tab. This gives you three sets of sliders that control moveing (translate), rotate ans scale on the three different axes (horizontla, vertical and depth.

If you mess things up you can just double click on the sliders lcd box and it will reset it back to zero. You can also go back to the OBJECT tab and hit reset.

You will want to position the world so you can see one of the continents. I set mine up so i can see Africa.

3D TEXT

Lets add some text to the scene now. Text is just another layer, so we hit the ADD butoon and select 3D TEXT.

You will need to position the text so its centered on the screen and is just in front of the world - you do this by selecting the AXIS tab , dragging the X TRanslate slider to the left and the Z translate slider to the right. You can also scale it down a bit by dragging the x and y scale sliders slightly to the left.

SETTING UP THE SCENE

Now lets add the rest of the scene!

Were going to add two more layers, one for the ESPN Interface and one for the text image. Once you have done this, drag the text interface's Z slider and bring it up close to you by dragging to the right. You will notice that it stops at 500 - to get past this click on the lcd and drag to the right to go over the default limits. Bring it up to around 750.

Ok, now we have our scene set up lets save it out before we animate it in case anyting goes wrong. Select the SCENE tab, and hit SAVE and then double-click on your filename - espn.jsf

If you want to take a snapshot of how things are going, you can click on the PHOTO button located on top of the GRAB DESKTOP button. If you click render by mistake, just hit it again to stop it. To look at your photo, go to the desktop and it will be in the top left hand corner underneat any images that are already there.

ANIMATING THE SCENE!

Ok, now we are going to bring the scene to life. We will start by hiding all the layers we dont want to see. You can do this by un-checking everything except for the world and the first layer you added (The one on top of the world layer).

To make things easier to understand, lets name this layer the earth. To do this, make sure its selected and hit the name button. Type earth in the pop-up box and hit return.

Now we can animate the earth layer! To do this, we first need to make sure we are at the first frame of the animation. Do this by dragging the main horizontal slider, the big one to the right of the vcr looking controls, to the far left. The green LCD should now be set to 00:00:00. We are going to call this slider the scrubber from now on to make things easier.

We are going to have the earth zoom in from outer space on to the scene. To do this, we will need go to the AXIS tab and drag the earths Translate Z slider to the far right. It stops at 500 - but we needs to go to 1000 so you have to click on the green lcd to the right of its z slider and drag that to the far right till it reaches 1000. The earth should dissapear off the screen.

SETTING KEYFRAMES

We want to record this keyframe (position in a animation) so you need to hit the KEY button to the left of the PHOTO button in the middle-right side of the screen.

Now drag the scrubber slider so its in the middle and we will move the earth in and set another keyframe. Drag the z slider and move it back to zero to do this. You can also play with the rotation values as well so the earth will spin around on its way back in. Once you have positioned it hit the key button again.

Now you can drag the scrubber from left to right, or hit the play button, and the earth should fly in and then stop!

We want to do the same thing with the 3d text but we want it to fly in after the earth... so lets set that up.

Drag the scrubber to the far right so the earth is off the screen again. Then hit the checkbox for the 3dtext layer so it turns on, you should see it in the middle of the screen where you left it.

You are going to do the same thing you did for the earth - go to the AXIS tab and click on the trasnlate Z lcd and drag it to the right until the text dissapears off the screen. Then hit the KEY button to record this.

Since we want the text to wait a bit before moving in, we will set anothre keyframe for it out in space before bringing it in. To do this, drag the scrubber and move it about one third of the way to the right or to where the scrubbers lcd reads 00:01:00 and hit the kay button again.

If for some reason the text poped back up thats a bug, just move the scruuber again and it will go back to where it was before setting teh 2nd keyframe.

Then drag the scrubber to where its around 2/3rds the way or towhere its lcd reads 00:02:00. We can now move the text back in by draginfg its Z Translate slider to the left and positioning it just in front of the world and hitting the KEY button.

Now you can drag the scrubber from left to right and you should see the earth fly in followed by the jahshaka text!

If you messed up, just make sure the Earth layer is selected, click the OBJECT tab and hit reset and then animate it again!

Now lets turn on the ESPN interface by clicking its check box. You may want to name it ESPN to make things easier. Hit the play button and you should see your first animation rocking on the screen! You may want to sve it out as a backup.

Ok, we're not ready to sell it to ESPN just yet, now we want to add some fancy overlay graphics. To do this, turn on the lst layer you added, and name it textlayer so you can tell it from the 3DText.

You will want tomake sure the scrubber is back in its far left position. Then go to the AXIS box and move its Z Transalte to where its around 1000. Then move its translate X to the left to where its aroud -50.

EFFECTS

Now we are going to fade it out! Go to the EFFECTS tab and you will see the transparency slider. You will want to drag this to where its round 35 so its slightly faded out.

Now we can animate it so it moves slowly from left to right as our animation plays. To do this just set a keyframe for it a 00:00:00 and then drag the scrubber to the far right and then move it to the right by dragging its AXIS X Translate to the right so it moves over but not off the screen. Then set another keyframe by hittiong the KEY button.

Now you can play it back and enjoy your creation!

RENDERING

In order to make your movie, you will now need to render it out. Dont worry, Jahshaka uses hardware rendering so it renders as fast as it play... although it usually slows down since we have to write the images to disk. To speed this up, we will switch over to the smallest file size whcih is uncompressed jpeg.

To do this, after you have saved your scene out, go to the desktop and hit the prefernces button. You will see a render quality slider, make sure this is set to the far left. Then go back to your animation, make sure the scrubber is also to the far left and hit the render button!

*hint - if your graphics card supports anti-aliasing turn on full scene aliasing (using your cards control panel - control for this will be added later on) and you will get a smooth looking animation!

You creation will now be visible as a clip on the desktop. Go to the dekstop, select it, and hit play to check it out!

ENJOY!

If you are using linux you can use the player to create a mpeg animated clip of your creation using the utility menu. We will bring this functionality to windows soon.

Hope you enjoed the first tutorial, later on we will get into the other modules!