i'm currently trying to teach a friend the rudiments of anim8or - he's not doing too badly, but he seems to keep forgetting where the 'mode' menu is. it's quite important, as that's how you get to 'the movie part of the program', aka. 'scene mode'. In the top menu bar, click 'Mode' (on the left, next to 'Edit'), and select 'Scene' - that'll take you to the bit where you can make stuff move. Once you're in there, you can add an object or figure to the scene by going to 'Build' (about half-way along the top menu bar), and selecting 'Add Object' or 'Add Figure'. obviously, that only works if you've already built some objects and/or figures!
i won't write a ton about animating scenes here, as there are plenty of tutorials out there that explain all that, but once you've got your scene finished, you can save a video file of it by first making sure you're looking at it from the right view (usually you want to be in Camera view), then going to the 'Render' menu, and choosing 'Render Movie'. that'll bring up a dialog which lets you set up your video (eg. file name, frame size, and stuff like that), then when you 'OK' that, it'll give you a list of codecs. the default is 'Uncompressed', which will take up lots of hard disk space, but give you maximum image quality. If you want a smaller file size, you might want to have a look at other codecs. once you 'OK' your choice of codec, you can then sit back and watch at your leisure, while anim8or renders your scene into a finished video clip, which can then be played back in Windows Media Player (or whatever), and/or put into a video editing program (if you've got Windows XP, then Microsoft Movie Maker should have come with your pc, it's not great, but it'll do the job if you haven't got another one).
hope that helps
- colclough
