# Glossary

Reference information is provided for the following topics:

- Animation

### Animation

Animation is tightly integrated with the other e-Picture components. This allows you to make changes to your layers and objects at any point during the image creation process and have those changes reflected in your animation. This in turn facilitates incremental development of animated GIFs so that there are no surprises when you get to the end of the animation building process.

The first step in creating an animation is to create multiple frames. You do this by changing the value in the Maximum field of the animation panel. By doing this, you add a time quality to each object and layer in your document. In the case of objects or layers that do not change during an animation, this time quality is ignored; the object or layer remains constant. However, for objects or layers that do change, this time quality is used to track the position, shape, opacity, etc. (state) across frames. This is true whether you explicitly change the state of an object or layer or you let e-Picture calculate the state based on a starting and ending state that you specify.

Frames in e-Picture are numbered sequentially, horizontally along the top of the animation panel. Layers are listed vertically according to layer order, with the bottom-most layer listed first. Objects are listed under their respective layer using the same precedence. Beneath each object and layer are their associated properties that may be animated.

e-Picture uses a little key icon in the animation panel to indicate that an object or layer state has been set. When you change the state of an object, the starting and ending keys are automatically generated and indicated in the animation panel (intermediate states are not). In addition, you can add keys manually using the animation panel menu.

The current frame is indicated by vertical blue bars that outline all of the objects and layers in that frame. When you change the current frame by clicking on any frame number, the document view changes accordingly to reflect the state of the objects and layers in that frame.

Generally speaking, you will animate objects or layers by performing the following steps:

1. Select starting frame of the object or layer you wish to animate in the animation panel
2. If necessary, set the initial the position, color, size and/or opacity (state) of the object or layer you wish to animate in the view
3. Select the ending frame of the object or layer you wish to animate in the animation panel
4. Set the final state of the object or layer you wish to animate in the view

It's as easy as that. The only common variation to the above 4 steps comes into play when you have an object that stays static for a time and then begins to animate. In this case, all you need to do is insert a key in the frame where the animation will begin, and then proceed starting with step 3.