The Animation Wizard provides a quick, automated way to create an animation. Once you start up the wizard, you are guided through the process by a series of simple wizard pages on which you choose all the properties you’ll need to create an animation.

The Wizard Icon is located at the beginning of the Main Toolbar. Click on the button or simply use (Shift =A).

This is the first page of the Animation Wizard asking you to choose a size for your animation, the default is "Same size as the first image frame". You would choose this option option if you want all frames to match the size of the first frame.

Choose the "As defined here" option to activate the Width and Height edit boxes for you to set the exact dimensions of the animation frames. Dimensions are measured in pixels. Be careful though, if you can skew the image if the pixels aren't set according to the dimensional ratio of the frame image. In other words, if your frame image is 200 x 200 pixels and you want to reduce it you have to use the same ratio, like 150 x 150 pixels.

This is where you choose your canvas color. Choose the "Transparent" option to allow any images behind your animation to show through in the canvas. If you are using a transparent tube, for instance, as part of your animation you would want to keep the transparency and this is the option you would choose.

Choose the "Opaque" option to select a canvas color for your animation. The current canvas color appears in the color box to the right of this option, in this case Black. Left-click inside this box to display the Color dialog box; right-click inside this box to display the Recent Colors dialog box. You can then choose your custom color. This is particularly good option if you have a custom color on your website and want to use this animation there as well. Matching the color to your website color makes the animation appear to be part of the whole page.

This Wizard Page helps you to position each frame's content. If the images you will be adding do not have the same dimensions as the frame size you set in the first Wizard page, you can choose one of the following positioning options:

Choose the "Upper left corner of the frame" option to align all images having aspect ratios different than the first image in the upper left corner of their respective frames.

Choose the "Centered in the frame" option to center all images in their frames regardless of each image’s aspect ratio.

If you are using a transparent tube and duplicating it in each frame then I suggest using the "Centered in the frame" option. This sets the tube into the center and the subsequent frames will be centered as well. Your image won't "jump" when animating.

If an image’s dimensions are smaller than the first image, the empty area surrounding the image can be filled in one of two ways:

· Choose the "With the canvas color" option to fill in the smaller-sized image’s empty area with the canvas color.

· Choose the "With the preceding frame’s contents" option to fill in the smaller-sized image’s empty area with the contents of the previous frame. If there is no previous frame, the "With canvas color" option will be used.

· Mark the "Scale frames to fit" check box. This will resize the image to fill the frame while maintaining the image’s aspect ratio. If you do not mark this check box, parts of images that have larger dimensions than the frame size may not be visible.

Setting the Animation Properties is our next page. Choose the "Yes, repeat the animation indefinitely" option to continuously cycle your animation until you manually stop it.

Choose the "Play it x times" option to play your animation the number of times you set in the edit box. This works well if you only want to image to repeat one or two times.

Set the display time for each frame in the display time edit box. All frames in the animation will be set to the same display time. These values can be changed later while editing the animation as we discussed in earlier lessons.

This is where you choose which image or images that you want to include in your animation. You must choose at least one image. Click on "Add Image" and browse to where the image or images are that you want to add to your

animation. If you choose more than one you can move the image up or down in the list as needed to create your animation. And you can remove any images that you do not wish to include.

This is the final page, and it will build your animation for you. It may take a few moments so allow it to go through the whole process. It will generate your animation, close the wizard pages and open the new frames in Animation Shop. You will then have a brand new completed animation like this one!