The Advanced Frame Editor is a fully featured and integrated drawing and animation suite
inside of BEYOND.
Because this is the case, we don’t have near enough time to go into every single detail
and instead we will focus on the main features you will need to get drawing and creating
using this tool.
To create a new frame using the advanced frame editor, right click on any empty cell in your
workspace, and click “New Frames (Advanced)”.
This will open the tool here.
On the top we have dropdowns for many options.
File lets you do a lot of your normal, new, open, and save functions.
As well you can find our advanced tracer tool here.
And you can click here if you want to publish your frame to the cloud.
Edit has mostly options for selection of points, copy paste of points, plus protections and
locks on points.
Points Mainly have options related to automatic optimization of your frame, which almost always
has to do with editing your points, and thus the label.
You can optimize blanking, clean up your frames dense points, clean up your path, transform
points from black to blank, and down here you can also modify visible points to change
density automatically and more.
Under Transform, you have options for predefined transformations to your frame, like centering,
rotations, scale, flatten to an axis if you are working in 3D, and even if you want to
warp your frame around an object in 3D.
Under Quick, you can change spacing, overall, or per tool.
Under Frame, you have options related to the bottom area where you animate, we will cover
these soon.
Under View, you have all options related to how your center preview view looks, for showing
off how points look, directions, blanking etc. which helps you understand your frame
as you create it.
In background, you can import pictures to use as reference images, to trace from, or
help guide your drawing.
Settings is where we have the settings for different tools and elements kept in once
place.
Under Tools, we have every single tool for drawing and creating in the advanced frame
editor, even ones you wont see on the left side.
Under play, you can start and stop your animation, and enable an extra preview window, and show
it live in lasers.
Lastly under window you can change the number of viewports if you are working in 3D, View
groups of tools on the right and bottom, and a few more tools.
Plus you can decide which tools show up on the left tool area, I recommend clicking full
toolset.
Below all those dropdowns is buttons for some of the options within those dropdowns that
you will use all the time.
Starting with saving, copy pasting, viewing of your frame, and binding.
Next you have the laser cursor to see your mouse position in real life, auto spacing
options, play and stop, preview window, visibility of the right and bottom areas, the frame analyzer
covered in a separate video, and if you want to lock movement on different axis of your
frame.
On the Left side you have your toolset.
Tools are colored depending on what type of tool they are.
You have Vector oriented tools in green with white dots, Point oriented with orange and
white dots.
Things mainly in blue are about selection, positioning, scaling, and modifying already
drawn frames.
This group is for coloring your points.
These tools in neon green in this group are classic LD2000 tools for users who would rather
use those tools.
Below that we have a few extra scattered tools that are newer or serve a specific purpose.
The bottom part here is for color selection.
You can color overall, or create color gradients
with these tools.
You can select a color before you start drawing to use that tool in that color, and you can
double click this big color rectangle to just pick your own color.
In the center is your area to build your frame.
The center preview window is where you draw your content, edit, and work.
Just like a canvas, or 3D space in other creation software, and while it looks 2d, it is actually
3D, and we can click here to change sides we view from.
Also, on the top left we can select a view, rotate around a view, move the view and zoom.
Zoom of which can just be done with the mouse scroll wheel.
Let’s just briefly draw a line in the front view, this will draw the lines on the X and
Y Axis without any z axis, however if we rotate to a specific 3D view, and draw another line,
it will be drawn on that plane, so you can see how you can create 3D drawings inside
this tool.
As well remember you can go to window, and open multiple views if you are working in
3D.
On the bottom you will see all points within your frame, their position, and color.
You can use this to go through the points to find and select specific points in your
frame.
As well you can group and activate/ deactivate points using this green bar.
On the bottom we have our frames for animation purposes.
You can add new, open and save specific frames here, copy paste cut, add duplicate, insert
empty, clear and delete frames.
You can also select all frames with this button.
With this lock icon you can secure content to lock it in different ways, this is covered
in a separate video.
As well the Info button will let you know what, if any, security the frame has.
Once you have multiple frames, you can move between them like this.
On the right of this window you have a few more tabs relating to a few things.
First is your point properties, if you select an individual point, it will show all properties
in it, like its position, color and fading.
As well you can change the point to be a point, vector or spline.
You can also decide how the conversion from point to vector works in the last panel.
Next you have properties for the entire frame/ animation.
You can choose if these options are going to be for each frame, or for the whole animation.
Then you can label the frame, choose color balance, and even select zones for that exact
frame, or for the whole animation, before you give it zoning in the workspace.
At the bottom you can choose how you want to scan, with calculation from scanrate, or
absolute PPS.
Plus, use force vector more or even add custom optimization settings for your anchors and
more.
Next panel you have view options, most of these are also located in different places
where relevant.
The last panel on the right is the Parametric shapes panel.
If you want to make parametric image cue types and insert them into your frame/ animation,
you can do so here.
Now that we have covered where everything is and briefly what they do, lets create a
few examples.
First we will create a standard, laser graphic, this could be a logo, a character, or anything
really that you want to be a frame.
Let’s create a new Frame/ Animation by right clicking on an empty cell in the workspace
and creating a new frame advanced.
Now we will import the image we want to create into the background, by going to background,
open frame, current.
And select our image.
Then I will set the brightness of this image to 10% just to make it fade in the background.
Now we can pick from many of the tools on the right to draw with, my personal choice
is line (Point oriented) for this application, but other tools could work.
And we will just select white for now.
Now we can start to draw and trace our frame just using our mouse.
Once we finish tracing, we can use this paint roller tool to recolor, clicking the color,
and dragging over the points we want to recolor.
After we are done coloring, lets use one of the optimization tools to clean up our frame
automatically.
Under points, click, blanking optimization, this will organize your blanking jumps in
the most efficient way.
Now we can create another cue, for laser mapping purposes.
Create a new frame in your workspace.
Now before anything else let’s do a couple things.
First let’s assign this frame to the zone we want to draw from.
Then we will enable laser output.
And lastly use a tool called the laser cursor, this will show where your mouse is in real
life over your zone, which will guide you where to draw your lines.
I prefer to use the point-based line tool from before for mapping, but you could use
any of the tools once you explore them all!
Now we can draw the lines we want to highlight on our mapping structure to create our frame.
Once you have done that, you can click okay and add effects to that frame to do all the
laser mapping effects you have seen before.
In our last example we will do automatic animation by interpolation by animating text.
First let’s make a new frame/ animation.
Then we can use the text tool here and write the text we would like.
Then we can select it all and scale, plus position to our starting point.
Now at the bottom we will duplicate the frame, select that frame, and reposition our text
to our end point.
Then under settings, click playback settings.
This will allow us to create a morph between the frames.
I will just select time based, select accelerate/ decelerate.
Select Morph between each frame, and end action to stop.
Then we will make it be only 1 frame per second to make it a nice speed and press okay.
Once we press ok on the editor and play the frame in the workspace, it will morph between
the frames.
Thanks for watching our quick hints video on the Advanced Frame Editor.
While this is one of the most feature rich areas of BEYOND and is impossible to cover
incredibly quickly.
we hope this video gives you a great starting point to experiment and create your own content.
If you still need help, feel free to contact our support line by emailing support@pangolin.com.