Curly is a tool to create simple vector
graphics animations and still images.
All of the following properties can be
tweened between multiple states:
Colors, including opacity
Gradients, including colors and control
points
Text styles
Image scaling and panning
Shapes
Stroke colors and widths
What Curly Can Do...
What Curly Can't Do...
Curly can export
animations as MOV, GIF, AVI, or DVC animations.
Curly can't
export animations in vector file formats, such as Shockwave or
Flash.
Curly can export
still images such as JPG, GIF, PNG, and SVG graphic files.
Curly cannot
read SVG or AI files.
Curly can produce
animations, but...
Curly does
not offer an animation preview or playback. The animation controls
work, but they don't offer much feedback.
Note that Curly was originally developed
my sophomore year of college. As my first program, it is perhaps
the most innovative and most badly programmed. All the controls
generally work, but not always on the first time. (Sometimes
you have to unselect objects and switch controls to make certain
features work.)
I plan on overhauling Curly and re-creating
it from scratch in coming months. In the meantime, I'm very interested
in being upfront and honest about what Curly can and cannot do.
Please let me know if you feel there's any feature or lack
of feature that should be mentioned on this page.
You can download Curly from the downloads
page (see the navigation links at the top of this page).
Samples
By tweening simple transformations and
panning, you can generate some really fun effects with just one
image.
The downside? Because of the rich photo-quality
colors and the high frame rate, this animation was saved as MOV
(movie) file. Even simple movies like this take a lot of disk
space. This movie is 1.7 MB.
To the right is a good example of a vector-based
animation composed only of shapes.
GIF files are good for animations like
this one: the large areas of solid color and the small number
of frames lend themselves to GIFs. This animation is 96K; that's
about 5% of the size of the movie above.
There are two distinct elements to Curly:
the vector graphics and the animation. At work we recently developed
a great commercial vector graphics editor: Twist
is designed to be easy enough for children to use, but it's feature
set is much larger than Curly's. If you're interested in vector
graphics and not animation, I'd recommend trying Twist.
