Summary The Mosaic Animations sub-tab in the Live Viewer tab of Muse Mosaic allows you access to our Live Viewer Animations. These are meta-animations that allow for tiles to be placed in such a way as to form a shape (or series of shapes) in the Live Viewer before going on to fully complete the Mosaic.

1.

First, in order to understand Mosaic Animation, it's important to understand what a Mask is in Muse Mosaic.

A mask is a very simple black and white image. When used by the Live Viewer to create an animation, the tiles in the Live Viewer will reform (per your animation settings) into the form of the black shape on your mask image.

For example, if this mask is selected:

...then this is generally how your animated Live Viewer will appear with it employed (specifics depend on the rest of your session settings, of course):

This effect, or something like it, is what you'll be setting up in this section.

2. 

Mosaic Animations are a cool way to have some fun with your live viewer. By activating animation and selecting from one or more of the available Shape Masks (or adding some of your own) you can create a set of a series of shapes for your tiles to take during the creation of your mosaic.

• Check Activate Animation for the animations to be implemented in your Live Viewer.
• Set your Duration (sec) determining how long your animation will take to form appear.
• Shape only: pause time after forming allows you to set how long the shape is held once it forms in the Live Viewer before the usual mosaic creation resumes.
• Frequency (times/hour) allows you to determine how often, per hour, this animation will occur.
• Tile selection gives you options in the drop-down menu as to which images are selected.
  • Only placed images will only use the images already placed when creating the animation.
  • Including billboard image will use your placed images, as well as the billboard image itself in your animation.
• Type of animation allows you to determine which animation method you wish to use.
  • Use Animations Sequence allows you to use the Animation Sequence that you have loaded. You can access this by clicking the Animation Sequence button (see below for more information).
  • Use selected mask will render your animation using only the mask selected in the menu of images to the right of the drop-down.
  • Use a random mask will randomize the mask selection from the available images in the mask menu
  • Use a random effect will pick from one of the many effects (not masks) that can be used with this animation feature.
  • Various effects ("Pushing," "Blowing," "Exploding," etc.) are also available in this drop-down, too many to describe here in detail. Feel free to play around and select different effects to see if they serve the purposes of your event.
• Accuracy allows you to control the level of accuracy to the source image you are attempting to achieve (think of each tile as a pixel, and the better the picture, the smaller the pixel). The higher the level of accuracy, the more images will be required to create a convincing recreation, but if your mosaic has a very high number of images, you can potentially create very accurate images.
• Minimum amount of tiles for animation can be set to prevent the animation from the beginning with only a few images, during which phase the "animation" will look more like a few random tiles being scattered around. There's no "best" recommendation for this setting--you'll want to consider the number of images you'll be processing, the timeline, and more when plotting out the best animation scheme.

3. 

The Test Animation button will instantly show you a sample of your animation in your open Live Viewer. You will want to have Live Viewer running to use this feature.

4. 

The Animation Sequence button opens the Animation Sequence Editor.

Here you can build a sequence of the available shape masks so that they will manifest in a particular, predetermined order. Once you've set your sequence here, select the Animation Sequence options from the Type of Animation drop-down in the Animation Settings section.

Just drag one of the Available shape masks into the Animation sequence list, and repeat, in order to build your sequence.

• You can save your sequence by pressing the Save Anim. sequence and selecting a destination for the settings file. 
• The Reset sequence button returns the sequence to its previously executed state.
• And Load sequence allows you to load a sequence file that you saved previously onto your hard drive. 

You can see a preview of the shape mask animation by dragging and dropping the mask of your choice into the space marked Drag to animate. You will see your billboard image animate into the shape of the selected mask. Check the Animation loop checkbox so that the animation preview plays perpetually, uncheck it to stop.

5. 

The Add Shape Mask button in the Mosaic Animations tab allows you to upload your own shape mask file. Just be sure that it is black and white and in the style of the prefabricated masks in order to be effective. It opens this window.

• Click Open to select the image file you want to use as a shape mask.
• Choose Keep aspect ratio if you want to use the native aspect ratio of the original image.
• Choose Stretch if you want to re-proportion the mask image to match the aspect ratio of the billboard/Live Viewer
• Adjust amount of black does just that for your newly imported image
• Click Add Shape Mask to add your new shape mask to the list available in the app.