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Gaffe
Introduction | Download | Online Help | Gaffe News | Art Gallery


What is Gaffe
Gaffe is a programming language (and -compiler) for making 2D animations. It a free for personal use and it can be used for spicing up video presentations, websites or sending original postcards. This site contains information on downloading, installing and using gaffe.

If you have any questions or remarks on this project, please drop me an e-mail.


Techniques
The Gaffe tool uses two techniques for creating animated movies. The first "technique" is using a programming language (also called 'gaffe') that -different from conventional languages- deals not only with "what must be done" but also "when it must be done". The new help files contain all the information about the language and the scheduler.

The second technique is image manipulation. More specific, the user divides an image into region and then gaffe can animate by morphing those regions. So, basicly, gaffe is a polygon morpher.

Finally, the processed images are passed to the "frame generator" who creates the frame you need to create a cartoon and dumps them to the hard-drive.

More on techniques and the math behind gaffe:

  • Gaffe uses the ODD-EVEN technique to draw a solid filled polygon. This is described here.
  • Before morphing, the polygon must be split up in distinct triangles. A guideline can be found here (this is not the actual gaffe code). Note that this algorithm cannot deal with all types of polygons!
  • The technique used to morph triangles is one of my own (schematic). The technique is pretty basic and not optimized, but it gives quite fine results.

Download

Package containing the compiler, documentation and a number of samples:


External links

>Latest News
August 21th, 2002. I have published the prototype's source code on this page (see the 'download' section).
>Article "Microsoft finds new enemy ..."
May 6th, 2002. I wrote an article for a friend and it should appear in IndyMedia newspaper one of these days. It's about the stupid attitude of Microsoft towards the amateur programmer and their fear of GPL;

The story of GPL versus Microsoft is here.

>Gaffe v1.01.00 documents & DocBook
April 19th, 2002. The first real version of Gaffe is in the making (-the current version on this site was only a prototype).

In a bizar twist of fate, I've worked on the documentation before working on the project itself; This is because I've taken up an interest in documentation-writing and started porting the doc's to DocBook. For people interested in technical writing; DocBook is good, but very uhm.. eloborate and, ironicly, the doc's about DocBook are poorly written.

The first draft of the new Gaffe documentation is on this site, here.

>Gaffe release for Win32
March 23th, 2002. The original idea was to release both Cattoon (a GUI front-end) and the core-code (the gaffe compiler) at the same time. However, it looks now that this was rather ambitious and I cut it down to gaffe alone. The objective is now to concentrate more on the core and get it fully tested before proceeding with the compiler's front-end.
>The website
February 28th, 2002. I've decided on the layout of the website: a mix between gimp and the more lively musikcity.br. The website contains all three logo's: the icon (a roll of film), the heading (smileys) and the splash-screen (multi-layer pic).

Remaining work is the testing the installer (w/ robustness), some help issues, saving extra project info, a bug in the z-order dialog, making some demo's and finally finding out why gaffe hangs sometimes. Pre-mature release is beginning of March and the first official release is planned for April when the web-site should be up-n-running.

OH - 20 AUG 2002