GIF Animation

[lunoob]

Suppose I want to make an animated avitar or logo for a website or something, but I want it small and compressed.  If I render a series of jpeg images or png images, how can I make them into a high speed, low drag little GIF animation?  Or could there be a better approach?

[Dadster]

   In Gimp?

[lunoob]

In anything.   

[Jaws]

To give you an idea of size, the two GIF animations I posted here, the neon one is 137.4 KB and the other is 405.5 KB.

Both were made with Inkscape images, output as .png files and used that way in the final animation that was created in ImageMagick.

I guess you'll have to define high speed and low drag to get a better picture of what you're trying to accomplish.

As always, ask away.

Cheers

[lunoob]

I guess you'll have to define high speed and low drag to get a better picture of what you're trying to accomplish.

Actually that part doesn't matter so much to me.  I can control the size of the final file by changing the Render settings in Blender.   

I really just want to learn a way to take a sequence of images I create in Blender, whether they be .exr, .png, .jpeg, .tiff, or whatever, and create an animated .gif image.  I just have no clue how to even start.   

If I could learn to do it both with the Gimp and with Imagemagick, that would be a treat.  Then I could compare the ease and speed of the two programs for that particular task.   

[Dadster]

  Hey Lunoob 
   Check this out  http://gizmothunder.blogspot.com/2006/06/gif-animation-in-gimp.html

[Dadster]

Did that link help?

[lunoob]

It did help, but the way I did it was to do File>Open As Layers each existing image in a sequence of 60 (which I think I could cut in half by reducing the "Frames Per Second" in Blender's Render settings.)

The animation works, but it seems to be showing all the Layers at once behind the proper animation, so it looks wrong.   

[lunoob]

Got it!!   

After choosing Save As and Export as GIF, under GIF Options where it says Frame Disposal Where Unspecified, I had to choose "One Frame Per Layer (replace.)  That did the trick!

I have a buddy that's a videographer, who does his own video editing and all that.  He's doing a video project for a church, and when I showed him some of my Blender stuff, he asked if I could animate the church's logo.  So I did . . . and here's the GIF animation from a small part of the whole Blender animation.  There's a white flash when it loops, but I may be able to fix that - I think I tried Remove Alpha on the first Layer to see what that would do.

[Dadster]

  That's Awesome     Very smooth animation.  Great work Lunoob!     I see 60 frames.  If you cut that down and the quality doesn't change could you post that also?  And how you did it.   

[lunoob]

Yup, I put the Alpha Channel back and it's all better now.  

[Jaws]

Excellent, Lunoob. Your foray into graphics is amazing how fast and far you've come.

Cheers

[lunoob]

  That's Awesome     Very smooth animation.  Great work Lunoob!     I see 60 frames.  If you cut that down and the quality doesn't change could you post that also?  And how you did it.   

Okay, here goes . . .

I went into the IPO Curve Editor window in Blender and moved the the two Key-Frames indicating -90 degrees of rotation to exactly 1/2 the distance from the first Key-Frame on the section of the Timeline where my animation settings were set to begin and end the Render.  Then I changed the Frames Per Second from 30 to 15.  Then clicked Anim (after creating a new folder for the new 30 images about to be created.)  I also changed the size of the "Image Size" down to 360 x360 (from the default of 760 x 576) with the Render Size already having been set to 25%.

Opened a new file in the Gimp, and did CTRL ALT O to "Open As Layers" and once I had browsed to the new folder I had the new 30 images in and selected the first image, I simply repeated the process 29 times using the down arrow and Enter keys to add each successive image as a new layer.  It took less than a minute.

The rest I did as before.  And now I have "high speed, low drag" animated GIF that might be suitable for the church's website.  

[lunoob]

Here's one where I opened a new file in Gimp that was only 90 x90 instead of the larger default.  I think this will make it show up in a smaller area when you click on it here.

[Edit:]  Ooooooo!!!  I like that!  You don't even have to click on this one.

[lunoob]

Excellent, Lunoob. Your foray into graphics is amazing how fast and far you've come.

Cheers

Thanks, Jaws.  Coming from you that means a lot!