Scripting an animation in Adobe Illustrator CS2

(this is from my old blog)

A few months ago I needed to implement a small loading animation (similar to the typical “AJAX”/Firefox circle animations seen in most RIA apps). As the IPTV platform I’m working on doesn’t support animated gifs, I had to develop my own “format” in JavaScript. This turned out to be a pretty slick component so I included it into our component library.

var i = 0;
do
{
   var layer = document.layers[0];
   layer.name = "frame"+i;
   for(var j=0; j<settings.n; ++j)
   {
      var angle = step*j;
      var radius = rs[j]; 

      var x = settings.x+Math.cos(angle)*
         settings.pathradius-radius;
      var y = settings.y+Math.sin(angle)*
         settings.pathradius+radius; 

      var circle = layer
         .pathItems.ellipse(x, y, radius*2, radius*2);
      circle.stroked = false;
      circle.fillColor = settings.colorfn(i,j);
   }

   if(settings.colorfn == colorTail)
   {
      var e = fgtable.pop();
      fgtable.unshift(e);
   }

   i++;
   if(i<=settings.n) document.layers.add();
} while(i<=settings.n)

To accompany my “FrameAnimation” component I wanted to create a few reference animations and started drawing a few circle animations in Adobe Illustrator. But as manual labour isn’t my thing , I of course has to create a script for generating the induvidual frames and then another for saving each frame as a PNG.

Downloads the source files:

• utils-js
• savelayersaspng-jsx
• createcircleanimation-jsx