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If you have ever switched your project window in Animator to frame mode, you have seen that each value for each channel for each frame of an object is stored in a single cell. When you use the fill tools in the project window you can take offset and animation action directly to the values in the cells. If you do so you create custom frames which are displayed with underlined values.
Xpressionist works like the fill tools - it creates custom frames. You can imagine Xpressionist as a sophisticated pocket calculator inside of Electric Image Animator. It uses math formulas and dependencies between objects that you create and feeds the results as a value (or values) into the cells of the desired animation channel. If you need a value from another animation channel in your math formula you can tell Xpressionist to read that value, do some math with them and feed the result back to the cells of other animation channels. It performs this action for every frame in the animation. So, when your source channel changes, the output of the calculator changes, resulting in user defined behavior of the object animated with Xpressionist.
Because Xpressionist is a modern pocket calculator you have the ability to write very complex scripts. These scripts are called expressions. Since the world around us and its physics is representable by math formulas, you have a tool to simulate every aspect of the world around us. You are only limited by your imagination and your mathematical skills. But even if your mathematical skills are limited, you can be quite successful. Xpressionist is easy to understand and to use.
The best way to learn about expressions is to use them. We made a quickstart section in this manual to show you the main concepts of Xpressionist and to give you short insight what this tool can do for you. We tried to make the workflow as smooth as possible and Xpressionist as easy to use as we could. We are very proud of the final result. Xpressionist is so incredibly powerful that even us who made it always feel like beginners since we have yet only touched the surface of what is possible with this tool.
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