Comment 1 for bug 170730

This is a great idea!
Keyframe illustration parameters, interpolate animated output.
This may not be high urgency, but a really worthwhile goal to keep in mind

while building illustration capabilities. It should be really easy to
support
animation if the idea is entertained early.

At Apple ATG in the 80's, Pete Litwinowicz and I wrote a "universal
keyframe interpolator," which would generate in-betweens from arbitrary
text keyframes, with e.g. cubic spline interpolation. (This basic concept

was originated, so far as I know, by Ephraim Cohen at the University of
Utah in the early 70's). We animated 3D raytracings, 2D fractals,
"Digital
Darkroom" image transformations, and animated sequences from
MacDraw and Illustrator! Make any graphics program an animation
program!

Later on, Pete built "Inkwell," a 2.5D illustration-based animation
program
reported in SIGGRAPH 91. This was a testbed for a number of animation
ideas, built on "Idraw," a vector-based illustration package developed at

Stanford.

A very powerful simplification is to restrict animation to variation in
parameters of key "frames" which are otherwise identical; no objects are
introduced or deleted (although they may appear and disappear).

The whole matter of interacting with the interpolation of key frames, and

editing and refining animation, becomes the sole task of the animation
extension. Some very interesting work in parameter control and editing,
which certainly merits consideration in a sequel, was done on our project

by Jack Liao, to whom the motion picture "Final Fantasy" was dedicated.