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Animata is a real-time animation software, designed to create interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances.

The peculiarity of the software is that the animation - the movement of the puppets, the changes of the background - is generated in real-time, making continuous interaction possible. This ability also permits that physical sensors, cameras or other environmental variables can be attached to the animation of characters, creating a cartoon reacting to its environment. For example, it is quite simple to create a virtual puppet band reacting to live audio input, or set up a scene of drawn characters controlled by the movement of dancers.

In contrast with the traditional 3D animation programs, creating characters in Animata is quite simple and takes only a few minutes. On the basis of the still images, which serve as the skeleton of the puppets, we produce a network of triangles, some parts of which we link with the bone structure. The movement of the bones is based on a physical model, which allows the characters to be easily moved.

The software can be run on multiple operation systems like Mac OS X, GNU Linux and Windows. Animata can be connected with widespread programming environments (e.g. Max/MSP, Pure Data, EyesWeb) used by multimedia developers and artists in order to make use of the possibilities of these applications in the fields of image editing, sound analysis, or motion capture.

Animata requires:

FLTK (1.1.x) http://www.fltk.org/

On Windows Animata is compiled from Cygwin (http://cygwin.org/).

Cygwin packages: python, subversion, fltk-devel, libjpeg-devel, libjpg62 libpng12, libpng12-devel, gcc-core, gcc-g++

Download the Scons tarball from http://scons.org, and copy it to your cygwin home directory. Then type: tar -zxvf scons-1.2.0.tar.gz cd scons-1.2.0 python setup.py install

On OSX install FLTK from MacPorts (http://www.macports.org/).

On OS X you can create an application bundle using "scons --app", or you can also open Animata.xcodeproj and compile and run the Animata Target from XCode.

In most Linux distributions an FLTK package is available. Animata is known to compile in Fedora, and Ubuntu (8.04, 8.10).

To build Animata, type:

scons

To run the software, type ./animata in the build directory.

There is a web page for Animata at

http://animata.kibu.hu/

This page also has information about mailing lists. Users should consider subscribing to animata-users:

http://lists.kitchenbudapest.hu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/animata-users

Animata-devel is for people interested in helping with the development:

http://lists.kitchenbudapest.hu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/animata-devel

There are two mailing lists, [email protected] and [email protected]. Use the latter if you are prepared for a more technical discussion with the developers of the package.

Issues should be reported through the google code project page at http://code.google.com/p/animata/issues/list