Summary of Techniques for Mathematical Animations
 
 
 
1.  Create an animation with Maple 8. See the rest of these pages for examples.
2.  While interacting with Maple, reduce the size of the image. Grab one of the corner handles and drag.  Remember that your image has multiple frames, and a large image will result in a very large file size--especially with 3D graphs.
3.  While you're interacting with Maple, adjust the color of your animation.  For a rotating 3D image, choose a color scheme in which the color of a point depends only on its z-coordinate.  (We like to use Z(Hue).)  This is especially important if you are taking advantage of symmetry in your image to make a 90 or 180 degree rotation seem like 360 degrees.  
4.  After you are satisfied with the appearance of your animation, right click on the image and choose  Export As ... GIF.  This may take up to a minute or more, depending on how complex your animation is, and depending on the speed of your computer.  Alternately, choose Export As ... HTML from the "file" menu.  In this case,  Maple will save an HTML page that contains your Maple code and the image, stored as an animated GIF file.  The Windows version of Maple saves the GIF in a subfolder titled Images.  
5.  Use an animation editor to do any additional editing to your image. Some of the touch-up editing that you may wish to do to your image: 
  • Slow it down!  With today's computers getting faster and faster, your animation may be moving at warp speed on some viewers' machines.
  • Crop out extra white space.  Images directly from Maple are frequently surrounded by a great deal of empty space that can make it impossible to position your animation properly on a web page.
  • Add transparency to the GIF.  This is important if you like to write web pages with backgrounds other than plain white.
  • Make it pause at the end, before beginning the animation cycle again.  (For example, in the Trefoil Knot animation, we pause after the knot is completely tied, before tying it all over again.
There are a number of animation editors on the market.  We like to use Animation Shop, which comes with Paint Shop Pro. (See http://www.jasc.com.) 
6.  Include your animation on your web page. All of the commonly used HTML editors include a way for you to insert images in web pages.  Since animations created in this way are simply animated GIF files, no special handling is needed to insert the image.
7.  Enjoy your new web page!!

 

Some final comments...  Inclusion of mathematical animations on your web pages can help bring life to otherwise static pages.  However, we caution you not to over-use these techniques, as we firmly believe that the effectiveness of these animations is greatly reduced by using them too frequently.  Too many spinning, flapping, or twisting images can be distracting to the readers of your web pages.